Installing windows on a computer. Easiest "fix" to any known software problems. But this laptop... I have never seen anything like it.
<background>
Ok so my friend bought this buisness class laptop for general use. He just wanted something that will serve him for a while and would have some horse power to it. Probably gonna be moving so he got a laptop. Couple days later hes screaming and hissing, telling my about this Win8 bullshit he just can't deal with. I just tell him to deal with it cause it probably for the best if I don't touch the OEM install thats still under warranty. Now after the 8.1 update just a couple days later he comes to me saying thats he can't use it anymore. So the 8.1 update was broken, it basically couldnt install cause of some finger enrollments. W/e got rid of it. Now half of the drivers are messed up. and the list goes on with his problems with it.
</background>
So when he told me just to throw Win7 on it plus it does have the needed drivers for , but... I couldn't. Being a buisness class laptop it has some fancy bios that wont let me boot up from anyting then the hard drive. I can't even tell if its the bios or some other shit:s its just so cunfusing so I was wondering if anyone might have encountered this laptop?
i think this does not belong in the Hacking section on the forum.
Anyway does the laptop has a boot menu? some laptops have a own boot menu, that you can acces hitting a key like F12. then you can select the boot device.
Figured it might not be the best place to post, but where else? Trust me this is not some-"ah yeah just go to bios boot settings and change the first boot device"
F12 doesn't work. If has some protection against booting from anything else. You don't even get to see the bios gui without the password. I literally have no idea how to break into this thing. Done stuff like that thousands of times. And yet not a single damn option in plain English to set the boot device. Should I borrow the thing and get some pictures?
If it came pre-installed with Windows 8 then most likely the firmware is not your old standard BIOS its the new UEFI firmware, what you need to do is boot into the firmware, now the key to press at boot up according to HP is ESC just like my laptop, now once you are in the UEFI you need to find a way to turn off the Secure Boot feature that Windows 7 does not support and will render booting W7 useless as only W8 suppports it, once you have turned off that off, If you can find a setting called Fast boot, disable it, if not just skip that part, then boot to your W7 installation media (if using a USB stick DO NOT PLUG INTO A USB 3 PORT as it will fail to boot due to there being no native support for USB 3 in W7, if you find it freezes on the W7 boot screen or "Starting Windows" progress bar most likely you wont be able to install W7 due to problems with it being new hardware that the OEM most likely wont support W7 with due to W8 being the latest version of Windows and if worse comes to worse just re-install W8 with a 3rd party start menu which basically make W8 run like W7
It kinda does because stock Win8 PC's don't come with standard BIOS, they come with UEFI configured to actively resist doing anything with the operating system, and booting to UEFI might not seem possible at first because the boot process is so fast that the window of opportunity to press Esc or F8 or whatever can be faster than human reaction speed.
Someone below posted a method that should work. If you know what you're doing you can work around it, but the best solution to dealing with Win8 issues is to *never* buy a pre-built Win8 desktop or laptop.
It work for me I was able to take complete control of my firmware, I was even able to manage my secure boot keys myself and turn secure boot of and all, best thing to do is as soon as it boot mash the key for your particular UEFI which you can find by looking up your brand (e.g ASUS) and UEFI key
I recently installed Windows 7 on an ASUS laptop which was supposed to only have support for Windows 8. If you are still trying to decide between Windows 7 and 8, do a search on HPs website for the Windows 7 drivers. I found none for this laptop on ASUS' website, and I had to get the drivers from each of the components' manufacturer. This is plain shitty, a dick move from Microsoft's side, who probably paid the retailers to adopt this marketing strategy, since the drivers for other operating systems definitely exist.
As for the booting part. I had the same problem as you, there was nothing at the boot screen telling me how I could launch the BIOS configuration utility. For me it was the F2 button, but other options are the F9, F10, F11, F12, ESC or even the old DELETE key. I found this information in the manual for the laptop, it was hidden somewhere near the end.
If you are trying to install from a DVD, then the boot option was in the BIOS, if it isn't in your version, then I'm afraid I don't know how to help you.
If you are trying to install from an USB stick, then first of all, USB 3.0 won't work. I had to install drivers in Win 7 to get it to recognize the USB 3.0 ports. If you have the USB 2.0 stick inserted, there was an option for me in the BOOT submenu of the BIOS which was something along the lines of "hard drive BBS configuration", choose USB from that. I think it appeared only after I inserted the USB drive.
Probably should have came back earlyer. So I still haven't touched it, but I think I get the idea behind those damn oem laptops that ship with win8. Next time I get by the thing I'll try again and see if it would let me in. I know it's possible cause the thing is a business class. So it has all the needed drivers for both Win7 and Win8. Thanks for the tips, will see where this could get me.
I had to go to HP's site, download the file "BiosConfigUtility.exe" which is part of their SSM package, install that in Win 8, and then run the utility like so:
That resets the admin password for the BIOS/UEFI. Then you can do the Esc when booting, log in as admin, and change the boot settings to Legacy, change boot order, etc.
Then install Win 7 or whatever else you wanna do.
As noted at the above HP link:
As the BIOS Administrator, passwords for other accounts can be reset or Reset BIOS Security to Defaults can be used to remove all accounts and security information in the TPM.