EEVblog® Electronics Community Forum
Products => Computers => Topic started by: DiazChris on August 14, 2020, 04:32:18 am
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So I recently bought a laptop from a school that is getting new laptop but there was a problem with mine. It appears that it still had the hard drive with all the block and stuff like that on it but gladly there was a guest account. Sadly they are located far away and I dong want to wait so long to ship it. so I decided to just remove everything myself, well until I relived that my expertises only goos so far.
So does anyone know of a way for me to complete tv reset it and make it undetectable from the school or would it just be easer to buy a new hard drive with windows or something like that.
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You say two conflicting things:
bought a laptop from a school
way for me to complete tv reset it and make it undetectable from the school
Is this laptop your property or the school's property?
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tv = TeamView (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeamViewer), I suppose. If this is true, the story may be that DiazChris has bought the laptop and he is the owner, but the seller (school) has not cleaned it up. Which implies they fail hard at basic security and privacy practices.
Basically I would not trust the pre-installed system. Erase everything, start from zero with a fresh installation.
Another problem may be licensing. You may not have right to use software installed on that computer: be it the operating system or other programs. Whether that is a concern to you is up to you, but you should be aware of the situation.
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The only important question is: is the BIOS/UEFI password protected?
If yes: laptop is useless (unless you can get the password from the school).
If no: fine. Flatten the harddisk and install what you like. Do NOT use any existing OS on the disk, you'll run into licensing and support problems.
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As @Benta said, if the BIOS/UEFI is locked there is nothing you can do - although some allow a password reset in some way AFAIK.
If you have access to the BIOS/UEFI I would recommend pulling the drive out of the laptop, connect it to another PC and completely wipe it. Do it from another system as you might not be able to do so if the OS is locked down and you do not have admin rights.
If you do not have another PC to connect it to or not the right connector - laptop drives can be tricky - then I would recommend to setup a USB stick with a live version of Linux and erase the drive completely from the OS on the USB.
I hope it helps,
Lary
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What model is the laptop? Is the laptop being managed by any MDM? Call the school and ask them to remove the block remotely.
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I think the OP is suffering from a problem similar to the one I had a few years back, when I bought a (brand new) "e machines" desktop.
The thing was supplied with a crippled version of Windows 7 plus a whole lot of software I didn't want, including (blecchh!) Norton.
To add insult to injury, it would reqularly crash.
The only way I could see to get it back up was to go back to "year zero", losing all the software I had added, plus some of the data, & restoring crap I had removed.
Ok, I looked on line to find an easier & less drastic way of recovering the thing.
None of them worked, because they assumed, as I had, that I had admin privileges.
Alas, I did not-----it appears "e-machines" didn't trust their customers!
The only real fix was to buy a proper version of W7 & install it.
Immediately, all the stuff that was normally supposed to be part of W7 appeared----and I didn't lose my data!
The regular crashes disappeared, & if the odd one happened, It was easy to recover, just by using the normal "recovery date" facility.
Thankfully, "e machines" didn't think to lock the bios---------I wonder why, seeing they seem to hate their customers?
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Thankfully, "e machines" didn't think to lock the bios---------I wonder why, seeing they seem to hate their customers?
Probably because most BIOS/UEFI passwords are trivial to reset if you have physical access to the machine. They probably didn't bother with the extra step.
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Are you asking how to repurpose a stolen laptop?
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Thankfully, "e machines" didn't think to lock the bios---------I wonder why, seeing they seem to hate their customers?
Probably because most BIOS/UEFI passwords are trivial to reset if you have physical access to the machine. They probably didn't bother with the extra step.
I've never bumped into one that couldn't be reset one way or another, some are less trivial than others but...
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It sounds like the OP bought a laptop with various accounts and maybe a Guest account activated, and he has no administrator rights, but he wants to take full control of the machine. What I don't understand is when he says "completely reset it and make it undetectable from the school"? What is being detected now? Do you mean personal vs. corporate account or remotely managed?
First, we need to know more... for example, what kind of laptop? What is the OS installed? (what version of Windows). Can he access the BIOS, is there a password, can he boot off a USB stick or CD-ROM even? If it is an older version of Windows, you can crack the admin password using a number of tools (Hiren's Boot CD) to reset admin pwd but you probably don't even want to use what's there. You would probably want to just wipe it clean and for legal reasons use your own licensed version.
The OP needs to post more info, we just don't know enough and the language barrier and possibly experience level may be issues. However we are here to help if we know more. If there are passwords then you have to contact the school to see if their admin set BIOS/UEFI pwds or you are out of luck.
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Are you asking how to repurpose a stolen laptop?
Are you saying the school donated the old laptops to a church for recycling, and the volunteer from the church took one home to see if the laptop was working or not?