Does anybody know the default password to get into
the recovery console on a Dell?...
When the machine boots up the blue screen tells me it cannot access the registry so I want to do a registry restore.
Am I on the RIGHT track
There is no default Dell password. The password is either in the BIOS (F2) or in Windows itself.Are you Garybv92 or Shady...? ?

patio.Garybv - please post the exact message you get when trying to open the recovery console.

Can you not do a system restore???1...I set the bios to boot from CD
2...The machine goes through the boot process
3...I choose Repair instead of setup or quit
4...I am then asked which windows installation I would like to log onto...I ANSWER 1
5...Then windows asks for the Administrator Password
  H.P. machines Just use Administrator for their default password ...on my home made machine I just hit enter
...I was  just wondering if anyone knew wat Dell uses
for the default password to get into the recovery console...
         Thanks for any help...

Aha.  I don't think this has anything to do with Dell or HP, this seems to be a glitch (one of many) in XP.  My brief experience with the Recovery Console showed that no matter what you enter, even if you just hit Enter, the message will appear TIME & time again.

Goto this site and about half-way down the page you will find a registry EDIT fix to stop XP asking for an admin password to get into the recovery console.

This worked for me but registry restore from the recovery console - could be a completely different matter!

This site has a list of the Recovery Console commands

Good luck

Or just hit Enter...Well, em, er, perhaps, mebbe, but when I came across the admin password problem trying to start the Recovery Console just hitting Enter didn't achieve anything except to bring up the "Enter Admin Password" message again & again & again ad nauseum.  Did hitting on just Enter WORK for you???   I finally used partition magic....resized the drive...created a new partition and formatted it.
I then installed XP on the new partition along with some
diagnostic utillities. I can now access the old xp installation and wll start repairs and retrieve data for backup.....Nice job, just as well you had PM.