This isn't now a problem since I ended up reinstalling the operating system but was there something I missed? Something I could have done?
A user was having some problems on her laptop and she was used to signing in using a PIN. I told it to boot into safe mode and on reboot it asked for her password - which she no longer knew and thereafter I could go no further. Needless to say there were no recover/repair/system image/password reset disks available.
I couldn't get back to normal boot and the only thing I could get into was the Win8 options menu which allowed such things as troubleshoot, select which type of safe mode boot I wanted, etc.
The password was tied to her microsoft account and, equally, she couldn't get onto that although we did eventually get it to change the password to one we knew but still I couldn't log on to the laptop. I suspect because it needed to get on first in order to change to the new one, even though I'd given it an internet connection.
The machine was set for secure boot from UEFI and when I turned off secure boot and set it to CSM boot mode, I was at least able to boot from CD, though nothing I had was able now to recognise the required partition to give me a shot at clearing the password.
I investigated changing the boot manager settings in an attempt to get it back into normal mode but couldn't find anything to help. Maybe that's not what controls it?
I did a manual registry restore to a point before I'd told it to boot safe mode but still it headed for safe mode.
All options (refresh OS, etc) required me to select the (only) account and enter the password. The only thing I could do was reset the machine back to its original state, which I did, restoring all her data.
The stupid thing is that I assume this mess is all about Microsoft trying to be more secure but all it did was lock me out of the operating system. I could still get at all the data with no problem simply by mounting the drive in another machine!
My problem was that although I would be able to log on in normal mode, I'd asked it to go into safe mode and now culdn't get back to normal mode and so had to wipe out the computer totally!
What else could I have done? What DOES control the safe mode boot mechanism and what could I have done to get back to boot into normal mode?
I felt I was heading in the right direction with editing the BCD file, though any editing tools I wanted to use would have had to be run on the remotely mounted disk.
A user was having some problems on her laptop and she was used to signing in using a PIN. I told it to boot into safe mode and on reboot it asked for her password - which she no longer knew and thereafter I could go no further. Needless to say there were no recover/repair/system image/password reset disks available.
I couldn't get back to normal boot and the only thing I could get into was the Win8 options menu which allowed such things as troubleshoot, select which type of safe mode boot I wanted, etc.
The password was tied to her microsoft account and, equally, she couldn't get onto that although we did eventually get it to change the password to one we knew but still I couldn't log on to the laptop. I suspect because it needed to get on first in order to change to the new one, even though I'd given it an internet connection.
The machine was set for secure boot from UEFI and when I turned off secure boot and set it to CSM boot mode, I was at least able to boot from CD, though nothing I had was able now to recognise the required partition to give me a shot at clearing the password.
I investigated changing the boot manager settings in an attempt to get it back into normal mode but couldn't find anything to help. Maybe that's not what controls it?
I did a manual registry restore to a point before I'd told it to boot safe mode but still it headed for safe mode.
All options (refresh OS, etc) required me to select the (only) account and enter the password. The only thing I could do was reset the machine back to its original state, which I did, restoring all her data.
The stupid thing is that I assume this mess is all about Microsoft trying to be more secure but all it did was lock me out of the operating system. I could still get at all the data with no problem simply by mounting the drive in another machine!
My problem was that although I would be able to log on in normal mode, I'd asked it to go into safe mode and now culdn't get back to normal mode and so had to wipe out the computer totally!
What else could I have done? What DOES control the safe mode boot mechanism and what could I have done to get back to boot into normal mode?
I felt I was heading in the right direction with editing the BCD file, though any editing tools I wanted to use would have had to be run on the remotely mounted disk.
