[purplesihb]

My moms computer is having issues starting up. It takes an extremely long time to boot up. it says windows is starting up... it takes a good 5 minutes to get to the page where she would normally enter her user name and password. Once you type in the password, it takes another 5 minutes before another "logon message" appears saying " The system cannot log you on now because the domain is not available". i have tried logging in under safe mode, b ut the same "log on to windows" box always appears asking for her user name and password. I cant even get past that screen to get onto windows. The desktop was built for her by an ex bf of mine, and is currently running on windows 2000 professional. We do not have any disks to restore it. Plus she has a whole bunch of graphics and work she does not want lost. any suggestions how to get it to log on?? thanks!

[DoubleHelix]

Does the login box have three lines? If not, is there a button on the lower right corner of the login window that when clicked displays a third line?

What exactly happened between the time it worked perfectly fine until now? Was the computer actually connected to a domain-based network? What user account is she trying to log in with? Administrator? Another account?

[purplesihb]

The login box only has 2 lines. one for the username and one for the password. there is a box that you can also check that says "login using dial up" ... She is trying to log in under another account.. that has worked before. i tried logging in under administrator, it takes forever for it to do anything. it keeps saying "the system cannot log you on now because the domain (then it inputs her last name) is not available,just cant seem to get past this window at all.

recently my brother and i have connected our computers to the wireless router, and she has had problems connecting to the internet. she thought our computers or the router was interferring with her connection. then it has been really slow since. last night she couldnt even get the computer to turn on. I took it apart and it was very very dusty, so i cleaned it out hoping that would do something. I just cant seem to bypass this "log on to windows" box.

[DoubleHelix]

You're not going to be able to "bypass" the login prompt. Since it's been running poorly, it's possible the drive is corrupt. If she absolutely needs files off the drive, you'll need to connect the hard drive to another computer to copy them off. She also needs to get a regular backup method. Hard drives and computers can and do fail all the time. Hopefully you can still recover some data.

[purplesihb]

another thing it also says when booting up before the logon screen is "preparing network connection" and "applying security policy"

[DoubleHelix]

That's normal with Windows 2000.

[purplesihb]

i pretty much found out the problem to this, but i am stuck with the fix... a lot of people had the same problem... here is the link to where i found this info...
http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum...00/t1129791552

my problem is, she does not have any of the original disks or the restore disks...