I’m trying to fix my elderly mother-in-law’s Lenovo desktop that will not boot. It’s got Win 8.1 w/Bing and is about 13 months old. (Please skip to last paragraph if you don’t want to read all the background story)
Long story short, this is what happened. It was running fine until yesterday and apparently she got some adware pop-up that prompted her to call a 1-800 number for support. She fell for it, called the number and gave some guy remote access to her computer (grrr… I know, I know). He had access for quite awhile before she called me on another line and I told her to ask what company he works for. He told her “I work for Windows.” I told her to hang up on him and shut down the computer.
So I get there this morning and her comp will not boot. It gets to the Automatic Repair page where I can ‘continue’, ‘troubleshoot’ or ‘turn off pc’, etc. Hitting ‘continue’ just restarts it and comes back to the same page. If I try any of the options under ‘troubleshoot’ it gives me a message saying that only an administrator can make these changes and that there are no administrator accounts on this computer. I tried making a bootable usb from Microsoft but when I click the drive to boot from, it just restarts and comes back to the Automatic Repair page. I tried to edit the boot sequence from the bios but there is no “boot” option in the menu. There is a “startup” option which lets me disable fastboot and such but no option to manually make it boot from the usb drive.
So tell me if I’m wrong but I’m thinking at this point the easiest fix is to just buy a new copy of Win 10 from Bestbuy and do a new install. My question is, will the new install format the HD before installing and completely get rid of all the current viruses? It’s probably a dumb question but in the old days you could just do a ‘format C:’, install the new OS and all was good. Thanks for any advice!
Rob
Long story short, this is what happened. It was running fine until yesterday and apparently she got some adware pop-up that prompted her to call a 1-800 number for support. She fell for it, called the number and gave some guy remote access to her computer (grrr… I know, I know). He had access for quite awhile before she called me on another line and I told her to ask what company he works for. He told her “I work for Windows.” I told her to hang up on him and shut down the computer.
So I get there this morning and her comp will not boot. It gets to the Automatic Repair page where I can ‘continue’, ‘troubleshoot’ or ‘turn off pc’, etc. Hitting ‘continue’ just restarts it and comes back to the same page. If I try any of the options under ‘troubleshoot’ it gives me a message saying that only an administrator can make these changes and that there are no administrator accounts on this computer. I tried making a bootable usb from Microsoft but when I click the drive to boot from, it just restarts and comes back to the Automatic Repair page. I tried to edit the boot sequence from the bios but there is no “boot” option in the menu. There is a “startup” option which lets me disable fastboot and such but no option to manually make it boot from the usb drive.
So tell me if I’m wrong but I’m thinking at this point the easiest fix is to just buy a new copy of Win 10 from Bestbuy and do a new install. My question is, will the new install format the HD before installing and completely get rid of all the current viruses? It’s probably a dumb question but in the old days you could just do a ‘format C:’, install the new OS and all was good. Thanks for any advice!
Rob