Wiping the lenovo laptop from hell... this blows.

[Evil Lurker]

So I decided to do some tinkering with the laptop I got a while back. I went to wally world and spent a fortune on a universal power brick (I said screw it, if it don't work I can always take it back, and on the upside it has multiple tips so if I get in the laptop repair biz it should work for more than one brand).

Anyhoos the OS is Win 7 Pro and sure as hell the admin account is password protected. And I have no restore discs and no way to make a set since I cannot access the OS.

Before having to bend over and pay IBM $55 for a set of discs, I'm going to try and wipe the drive on my XP box, download a legit installation ISO, use that to install 7, then load the recovery software creation program (thank goodness its availible on the drivers page), create a driver disc from the recovery partition, wipe the drive again, and then do a clean install.

Normally I would just say screw it and install 7 by itself without all the bloatware, but since the laptop shipped with orifice 2010, me thinks it should be worth the extra time and effort.

But jeez what a pain in the ass. I have a slow DSL connection (175k per second) and am going to have to download a whopping 4+ gigs of data. Its gonna take all night. Sheesh

[ratdude747]

Re: Wiping the lenovo laptop from hell... this blows.

at least you don't have dial up .

[Evil Lurker]

Re: Wiping the lenovo laptop from hell... this blows.

Back before I got DSL in such a situation I rigged up an inverter and PCI WIFI card in my desktop and went and mooched off of McDonalds.

Awkward as hades using a desktop in a car, but it worked... as long as you could afford gas enough to idle your motor so you wouldn't kill the battery.

[aftonr]

Re: Wiping the lenovo laptop from hell... this blows.

So I decided to do some tinkering with the laptop I got a while back. I went to wally world and spent a fortune on a universal power brick (I said screw it, if it don't work I can always take it back, and on the upside it has multiple tips so if I get in the laptop repair biz it should work for more than one brand).

Anyhoos the OS is Win 7 Pro and sure as hell the admin account is password protected. And I have no restore discs and no way to make a set since I cannot access the OS.

Before having to bend over and pay IBM $55 for a set of discs, I'm going to try and wipe the drive on my XP box, download a legit installation ISO, use that to install 7, then load the recovery software creation program (thank goodness its availible on the drivers page), create a driver disc from the recovery partition, wipe the drive again, and then do a clean install.

Normally I would just say screw it and install 7 by itself without all the bloatware, but since the laptop shipped with orifice 2010, me thinks it should be worth the extra time and effort.

But jeez what a pain in the ass. I have a slow DSL connection (175k per second) and am going to have to download a whopping 4+ gigs of data. Its gonna take all night. Sheesh

Just a thought instead of doing a fresh install I use offline nt password editor I have used it successfully on xp,vista, and windows 7 all os 32 or 64 bit. it is a good free tool to have in your arsenal... here is the link to download if you are interested http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/ just follow the directions it is easy to figure out.

[shovenose]

Re: Wiping the lenovo laptop from hell... this blows.

Back before I got DSL in such a situation I rigged up an inverter and PCI WIFI card in my desktop and went and mooched off of McDonalds.

Awkward as hades using a desktop in a car, but it worked... as long as you could afford gas enough to idle your motor so you wouldn't kill the battery.

Ever heard of a laptop? :P
I never new McDonalds had Wi-Fi...
Anyway, yeah that's actually a pretty good idea.

[momaka]

Re: Wiping the lenovo laptop from hell... this blows.

I never new McDonalds had Wi-Fi...

Not all of them have it, just the "participating" ones. I read about that about a week ago on the paper bag of the meal I ordered. The Big Mac I got that time was a bit salty. Anyways...

Back before I got DSL in such a situation I rigged up an inverter and PCI WIFI card in my desktop and went and mooched off of McDonalds.

Awkward as hades using a desktop in a car, but it worked... as long as you could afford gas enough to idle your motor so you wouldn't kill the battery.

lol.
You might have as well just bought whatever you were downloading instead of wasting money on gas . But then you wouldn't have the cool experience of using a desktop in a car.

[Evil Lurker]

Re: Wiping the lenovo laptop from hell... this blows.

Ah the joys of being out of money.

I got the laptop up and going... said screw it and wiped the drive. Windows 7 installed without a hitch but the sheer number of updates are huge.

Hopefully my power bill will go back down now and I won't have to worry so much about those Canicon caps in the PSU going tits up at any moment.

[Evil Lurker]

Re: Wiping the lenovo laptop from hell... this blows.

Alright clean install and all updates from microsoft and IBM have been installed, got my flash player, java, realplayer, and adobe reader going. Defragged and optimized the hard drive with Auslogics. I would say its about ready to go.

Now if it only had more RAM (only has a single 2gig stick) in it and a faster hard drive, I think I would be satisfied for a little while.

[ThePCDoctor]

Re: Wiping the lenovo laptop from hell... this blows.

All so unnecessary.
You just need a boot CD with the "Change password" program on it.
I don't know why they call it "Change" when it actually REMOVES the passwords.

I have to use it often, when someone drops off a Laptop PC for repair and neglects to let me know that it's password protected and they don't give me the password.

So I just whip out my Password Removal CD and in five minutes I'm IN!
Then later, I try to educate my customer as to the futility of password protecting their PC. Passwords are like a $.50 padlock, just meant to keep the honest person honest.

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor

[Evil Lurker]

Re: Wiping the lenovo laptop from hell... this blows.

Time consuming but really no big loss as I was going to wipe the drive irregardless since I'm no too sure of the history behind this machine... I'm just praying it isn't stolen since the individual whom I aquired it from is shady to say the least. Actualy I didn't even want to buy it, but he kept on pestering me cause he was broke and needed some drug money so I gave him some chump change just to get rid of his dumb ass. Figured wost case scenario i could flip the parts on ebay and get my money back.

Looking at the contents of the hard drive it appears he got the laptop off of some chick.. honestly I really don't poke around recovered hard drives too much. I just look for pron or other juicy stuff and stuff like personal information I don't bother with.

I will say one thing though, I made damn sure to go into the bios and check to see if tracking had been activated before I ever connected to the net. Fortunately it was not, but I went ahead and flashed it anyways for good measure and wiped the drive via low level format on another machine... thats the last thing i need is to unknowingly aquire a stolen government laptop try and have it phone home and tell whoever where its at.

[ThePCDoctor]

Re: Wiping the lenovo laptop from hell... this blows.

As I set up new computers quite often, I usually get the old ones Given to me, just to get rid of them.
After some preliminary HD Cleanup and Virus Scans, I create a new USER with Admin privileges and then Delete the Old user. That gets rid of all the personal stuff from the previous user and pretty much makes the PC like a new one, but with some software installed. Then I go into Add/Remove programs and take out all the BS software, spyware, etc.
Then I have a nice clean little PC that I can start upgrading for future use.

Wiping an old PC sounds good at first light, but can become a nightmare when you can't get the drivers for the hardware. I just had a similar experience with an eMachine that was given to me. I wanted to check with eMachine to see if I could get all the drivers before I did anything like wipe the drive. I downloaded the only drivers they had for that model and found they were all wrong for that Motherboard. It was NOT the mobo that eMachine said it was. Go figure. It appears to actually be a Gateway mobo.
Going through my own driver cache, I found all the drivers that I needed for a wipe and reload. I actually just set aside, the original IDE drive and put in a SATA II drive and loaded it with XP-Pro-SP3. Then I increased the RAM from 512meg, to 2 gig's. The little PC is running GREAT now.

So before you ever wipe out an existing OS, make sure you have all the Correct Drivers for the hardware. Just a thought.

Cheers Mates!
The Doctor

[momaka]

Re: Wiping the lenovo laptop from hell... this blows.

Looking at the contents of the hard drive it appears he got the laptop off of some chick.. honestly I really don't poke around recovered hard drives too much.

You should. What if the laptop was stolen, the chick was hot, and you found her phone number with her personal info? You could nail the guy who sold it to you, then return the laptop to the girl and maybe work out a date or something . See where I'm going?

I just look for pron or other juicy stuff and stuff like personal information I don't bother with.

Same here more or less.
Well I don't look for porn because I'm not really that interested in it. Moreover, I've been bit by that before. Example: One of my computers I use regularly (a Gateway Select 750) came from a dumpster. It had the hard drive and pretty much everything else needed to run. The hard drive wasn't even formatted, and because it had Windows XP, I decided to clean it up and just use it. After doing that, I had a look around on the HD and found some .mpg files that I was almost certain was porn. I decided to open one of them just to see if it was something good - but it wasn't. It was gay porn! Now, I don't have anything against gay people, but when it's not my thing, it just looks.... uhm... (for the lack of better words) weird .
After this incident, I deleted all of the personal data. Never again.

I do still look for music though. On another computer I found by the dumpster (also had Windows XP and drive was not formatted), there was some good Mexican? pop music. I ended up liking quite a few songs.
Funny thing is, the girl that used that computer now goes to my university (and she's kind of hot too). If I ever want to talk to her, I now feel like we have something common to talk about - like that music, for example .

So before you ever wipe out an existing OS, make sure you have all the Correct Drivers for the hardware. Just a thought.

Yes, that's a very good point there.

I accidentally uninstalled the audio drivers on one of the computers I found above and after 2 hours of looking around the net and not finding anything, I was forced to use system restore and put back some old restore point that also had some spyware with it unfortunately.

[joshnz]

Re: Wiping the lenovo laptop from hell... this blows.

I just use a offline password reseter.
only encrypted pc's are safe from me.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Wiping the lenovo laptop from hell... this blows.

except for those 'encrypted' hard drives i've seen come from some tops with hardware passwords

yeah the latest NT password reset should work on win7, vista, xp, etc. our shop has used it many times with success