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Problem description: Twofold problem: 1) Have a gifted laptop running Win 8 that appears to be infected with malware. Said laptop is an HP 15 g019wm. Navigating with IE seems to be problematic with the machine just going random seeming places and not responding to commands. IE is the only web browser installed. AV software is long out of date. 2) Have no admin access to allow installation of software. DO have restricted, user-level access to computer. Attempted fixes: What have you tried to do to resolve the problem? I've tried doing an end-run around the OS and using a Linux based PW cracker. The damned EUFI doesn't want to let me boot to the Linux disk despite several variant tries at different boot options. So, I suspect I could deal with the problem IF I could just get admin level access. Unfortunately the guy who set it up forgot the damned password. Have tried obvious common passwords with no luck. If I could get it to boot from a Linux disk I could always go the DBAN route, but that seems excessive for now. In any case I haven't been able to get it to boot from either CD or flash drive. Have no Win 8 install disk to try, either. Recent changes: Have you made any changes to your system/configuration recently that might have caused the problem? This is a good question. This laptop was serving as the public access computer in a coffee shop that was run by a friend until the place went belly up. I suspect someone either carelessly or deliberately infected it with malware. Other than that, no, I haven't made any changes other than the boot order of the BIOS. -- Operating system: e.g. Windows 8.1 System specs: Machine manufacturer/model number: HP 15 g019wm As far as I know the machine is stock, just like it came from the factory. i.e. like this: http://www.cnet.com/products/hp-15-g019wm-15-6-e1-2100-windows-8-1-64-bit-4-gb-ram-500-gb-hdd-f9h60uaaba/specs/ Location: What country are you in? USA I have Googled and read the FAQ: Yes
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Jul 3, 2015 22:10
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Can you bring up the HP recovery console at boot? That machine almost certainly has a recovery partition, and you should be able to use it to reinstall the original image the machine shipped with. It looks like repeatedly pressing F11 after powering on the machine should take you to that console. If you don't care about anything currently on the machine then this should at least get you up and running (and then need a lot of updates). http://support.hp.com/us-en/product/HP-15-g019wm-Notebook-PC-(ENERGY-STAR)/6545564/model/6761879/document/c03546603
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Jul 4, 2015 04:07
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If you can get into the BIOS, you will need to disable secure boot and enable legacy boot (or BIOS boot) in order to boot off a Linux disk. You will then need to change those options back for Windows to work again.
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Jul 4, 2015 16:27
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CaptainSarcastic posted:Can you bring up the HP recovery console at boot? That machine almost certainly has a recovery partition, and you should be able to use it to reinstall the original image the machine shipped with. It looks like repeatedly pressing F11 after powering on the machine should take you to that console. Thanks! Looks like that worked.
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Jul 4, 2015 17:53
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