Can't authenticate to admin account or restore windows

[joea9]

Hi

I'm posting this on behalf of my sister who has brought me her poorly new HP Pavilion laptop to take a look at (she's accidentally downloaded and installed some scareware), but I'm stumped too.

The thing that's holding me back from fixing it, is that I can't authenticate to the admin account . Meaning I can't access msconfig, I can't install or uninstall any applications, can't get into 'HP Recovery Manager', I can't do anything really.

She has two Microsoft accounts, one is a user account, and the other is the admin account. I can log in to the user account without any problems, but cannot authenticate to the admin account when performing an admin function. Both accounts use Yahoo email addresses.

I've reset the password for the admin Microsoft account (via the web), and I can log into it via the web. But the same new password doesn't work in Windows when authenticating any admin actions.

I've rebooted and tried the admin password again, but it still doesn't work.

Looking online, the solution to this is to reinstall Windows, which would suit me fine, but I can't do that either...

When I restart the computer and hit F11 to access System Recovery, I get a screen saying:

You need to sign in as administrator, but there aren't any administrator accounts on this PC

At bottom of this page there is an option that says:

Forgotten Your password or cant see your account?

When I click on that option it then says:

This list only shows administrator accounts that have previously signed in to this PC

The only option then is to click 'restart', and it boots back up.

So, I can't do anything on the computer because the admin creds don't work, and I can't fix that because it won't let me reinstall Windows due to some issue with the admin account. But I can't check the admin account because the admin creds don't work

Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[play2mefish]

Do you have access to another computer? If so, download and create an ISO file from Microsoft, and then run the install from a USB stick. There is a link on how to do that on this site somewhere...I'll look for it later this evening and post it, unless of course someone beats me to it. Wait, I found it, here it is: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/18309-windows-8-windows-8-1-iso-download-create.html?filter[2]=Installation

 

[joea9]

Thanks for the reply, so I need to:

• download the iso
• create a bootable USB stick from iso
• install Windows onto the laptop using the USB stick

I'm assuming that if the laptop didn't come with separate installation media etc, then it must have an OEM license. And therefore the license should be automatically picked up when reinstalling Windows?

I don't have the laptop in front of me at the moment, but it would be good to know if that's correct in theory.

I'm a bit worried I'll start reinstalling Windows and then find it won't find the Product Key, or accept the current one?

 

[play2mefish]

In theory, yes that is correct. If the new laptop is a new one and has UEFI bios, then yes the OEM key will be in the bios and you will be good to go. If not, you will then need an OEM key. I'm not sure of how you go about doing that...but search for it on this site and you will find it how to do it. Good luck!