Thank Fuck For Thatâ„¢ Big thumbs up for Winternals EDR Commander - resurrecting the laptop that would otherwise have been a format and reinstall! My old man's HP laptop wouldn't boot, it just hung at the blue XP screen - no login, no welcome message, nothing. Rebooting into safe mode, last known working profile or anything else would just not work either. I rebooted and tried the recovery console but the fuckers at HP had added a password to it which obviously they don't tell you. It only took me 5 mins to get round that with a Linux boot disk [1] but even so the Recovery Console didn't really do much at all. So then I tried to do a Restore, but in their wisdom HP also remove that from their XP Home installs, so I couldn't go back to a previously working config. Cunts. Much swearing later and my mate recommends EDR. He lends me his disk and I boot with it. About 3 mouse clicks later and I'm into the restore feature and set it back to the previous know working setup (a day before) and it boots up first time. Fucking HP and their fucking useless OS installs. FERITE. So in summary: 1- remove the password check on your recovery console now 2- make sure you have system restore enabled 3- make sure you can actually access system restore 4- if all else fails, use EDR This post was brough to you by Getting It Off My Chest. [1] removes the check for admin password for RC in the registry.
