Hi, I'm after a little advice here, I've been given an Asus S500C laptop, which runs Win8 - but it's asking for a login password - anyone know how to reinstall Windows from the recovery partition and reset the entire machine without getting in to Windows first?.
For that matter, would installing Win10 (from a USB drive) wipe out the existing passwords?.
If your Win10 installation is a full install and not just an update for Windows 7, 8, or 8.1, then it might let you wipe out old passwords. I think you'd be better off, though, creating a Ubuntu Live CD (free) and wiping (formatting) the hard drive completely before installing Windows 10.
I'm just saying this off the top of my head. I've never done this, so take my suggestions with a grain of salt.
Unfortunately it's only an update, on a USB drive I used to update my Win8 machine at home over Christmas.
I've been doing some more googling, and have found a suggested method - assuming I can get the laptop to boot to a command prompt - I'm off work tomorrow, so I'll have a further play then. I've not got the PSU either, but these are cheaply available if I can get it sorted out, for now I've found a plug that fits it, and I'm going to try 19V from my bench supply when I get home (it's about half charged at the moment, but I don't want it to die while I'm 'fiddling' with it )
Hi Nigel,
Could the password be the bios password ? If so try Googleing "Asus S500C bios password" It comes up with some suggestions to get round the problem.
Hi Nigel,
Could the password be the bios password ? If so try Googleing "Asus S500C bios password" It comes up with some suggestions to get round the problem.
"If i recall correctly" win 8 system is like cell phone, can not change version... Os is installed right from bios
try to fresh reinstall from safe mode/bios level, get as close to formatting as you can,
I would even eject HD, format it from my pc, put it back in laptop and run recovery,.... research this before implementing, just a guess from old memory , and a one time service i did... (maybe needed recovery cd)
Getting a bit further, following lot's of googling I eventually managed to boot from a Win10 USB drive and get to a command prompt.
From there I managed to add a new user (myself) using the 'net user' command.
Next problem was it was only a standard user account !!! - and I needed an administrator account to upgrade it
More googling, back to the command prompt from the USB drive, and running regedit I managed to enable the default Administrator account and upgrade mine using that, then deleted the two original accounts.
So it's looking good, but the battery is getting really low, and I couldn't get my bench supply to work with it, possibly the plug I'm using isn't the correct size.
Just a bit of an update, the Asus was already upgraded to Win10, and (presumably due to the small size of the SSD) doesn't have a recovery partition on the drive - I'll make a recovery disc when I get round to it.
The PSU I ordered for it has come, and I've got it charged up now - it seems pretty impressive, particularly the SSD - the Laptop is completely silent (which is really weird ), and boots up extremely fast.
I'm so impressed with it I'm considering getting an SSD for my desktop machine, has anyone any thoughts on that?.
Hi, I'm after a little advice here, I've been given an Asus S500C laptop, which runs Win8 - but it's asking for a login password - anyone know how to reinstall Windows from the recovery partition and reset the entire machine without getting in to Windows first?.
For that matter, would installing Win10 (from a USB drive) wipe out the existing passwords?.
You need to read the rest of thread, I've got it sorted
Took a fair bit of googling, but OSK.EXE was the key.
But to answer your specific two questions, I could get into BIOS (I had to, to enable booting from a USB drive), and couldn't get to the Recovery menu as I couldn't get as far as Windows. By using the OSK.EXE trick and NET USER I was able to add myself as an extra user, then from that was able to enable the default Administrator account using REGEDIT.
In desktop computers it is generally preferred to have at least two separate drives: 1) One small SSD that you can get for relatively cheap--You install the OS on this drive, and it allows it to run fairly quickly, at least compared to HDDs, and 2) One large HDD (in the order of hundreds of gigabytes or terabytes) to use for your data--You would save your documents, videos, photos, music, and other files on this drive. SSDs in the terabyte range are very expensive.