S
Steve_600
Hi, I am helping a family member with their Windows 10 Home Dell laptop because they are having a very strange series of issues.
The laptop came with bitlocker turned on by Dell despite being Windows Home, but I was able to help them decrypt the drive and disable bitlocker via the startup repair command prompt. This was needed because the bios accidentally updated with bitlocker turned on and it needed the recovery key to start. That part should be solved now. C is no longer encrypted.
But now Windows says it failed to boot. Startup repair also now asks for a password, which it didn't before. We've tried the PIN, the hotmail/microsoft password associated with the windows login, and have even reset the password but it still says incorrect password. I want to get into startup repair to run the bootrec commands to fix the boot. This is a newer laptop so it is using UEFI.
Tried using USB bootable recovery media, and it can run bootrec /fixmbr, but not bootrec /fixboot. Fixboot gives an access denied error. I checked diskpart> list vol, list disk, and also mountvol and the USB drive copy of windows command prompt cannot see the SSD in the laptop. It only shows the USB drive itself, which shows as C.
I found this potential solution in another thread, but if diskpart can't find the other partitions on the SSD (or the SSD at all) then I don't know how to run the command and not sure which letters to put in below:
"bootrec" command sometimes has problems finding proper boot device and windows installation to fix.
Use "bcdboot" command to fix boot (bcdboot requires that partitions are specified explicitly!)
bcdboot N:\windows /s M:
specifies N: as Windows partition, M: as system partition.
Use "diskpart" or "mountvol" commands to map system partition. See notes for Fix Windows boot for further help."
I'm at my wits end trying to figure out how to fix this so the computer can boot/login. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Continue reading...
The laptop came with bitlocker turned on by Dell despite being Windows Home, but I was able to help them decrypt the drive and disable bitlocker via the startup repair command prompt. This was needed because the bios accidentally updated with bitlocker turned on and it needed the recovery key to start. That part should be solved now. C is no longer encrypted.
But now Windows says it failed to boot. Startup repair also now asks for a password, which it didn't before. We've tried the PIN, the hotmail/microsoft password associated with the windows login, and have even reset the password but it still says incorrect password. I want to get into startup repair to run the bootrec commands to fix the boot. This is a newer laptop so it is using UEFI.
Tried using USB bootable recovery media, and it can run bootrec /fixmbr, but not bootrec /fixboot. Fixboot gives an access denied error. I checked diskpart> list vol, list disk, and also mountvol and the USB drive copy of windows command prompt cannot see the SSD in the laptop. It only shows the USB drive itself, which shows as C.
I found this potential solution in another thread, but if diskpart can't find the other partitions on the SSD (or the SSD at all) then I don't know how to run the command and not sure which letters to put in below:
"bootrec" command sometimes has problems finding proper boot device and windows installation to fix.
Use "bcdboot" command to fix boot (bcdboot requires that partitions are specified explicitly!)
bcdboot N:\windows /s M:
specifies N: as Windows partition, M: as system partition.
Use "diskpart" or "mountvol" commands to map system partition. See notes for Fix Windows boot for further help."
I'm at my wits end trying to figure out how to fix this so the computer can boot/login. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Continue reading...