Why does 7 ask for a P/W when you hit F-8 while booting up?

I painted myself into a corner by using F-8 on bootup when the 'balls" are ready to form into the Windows 7 logo.

7 continually asked me for a P/W and on reboot the same thing happened over and over again. There was NO way to recover from this mistake and I had to restore a good image to make it work again.

I never had a P/W to begin with and just hitting Enter, like on XP didn't work.

A password recovery program only showed my name as a P/W and that too didn't work.

Makes me wonder why 7 stayed in that "Ask for P/W mode* after I made the mistake?

Thank you,

J T

Are you referring to System Recovery Options?

If password is requested just leave it blank.

Better to use the Repair function on the Win7 installer. F8 options and Repair disk ask for p/w.

Well IMHO anyone running a computer today that doesn't use a login password is just foolish. They should make all OSs require a password or you can't use it. That would stop all these type of problems.

Good luck to you and best wishes.

gregrocker said:

Are you referring to System Recovery Options?

If password is requested just leave it blank.

Better to use the Repair function on the Win7 installer. F8 options and Repair disk ask for p/w.

Hello,

No I wasn't trying to use the recovery options, I was merely trying to get into safe mode. I had forgotten that the Asus MB I use doesn't allow that, it wants an F-5 key to be pressed to get to SM.

Somehow using F-8 on bootup made the system stay in the "ask for P/w mode" from that time forward.
Since I had no P/W to start with I just hit Enter but of course that didn't fly. Then I made a Password Reset Disk and ran that and it gave me an error and failed.

Hard to believe that no one seems to have an answer or has encountered what I experienced.

Thanks again,

J T

On Asus F8 can be both the key for the BIOS Boot Menu and then when the BIOS hands over to Windows it becomes the key for Advanced Boot Options.

I have no idea why it would ask for p/w just by tapping the F8 key. I've never heard of that.. Maybe someone else has a theory. We've seen just about everything here.

Layback Bear said:

I have never seen such a thing unless some one has set a password in the bios to enable someone to use the bios only if they know the password.
MY Asus bios has the ability to be password protected. I don't use it.
If someone gets to my bios that means they have already killed me.

I couldn't of said it better.

edwar said:

Well IMHO anyone running a computer today that doesn't use a login password is just foolish.

Whenever I hear the word password, I want to reach for my gun.

I've lost count of the number of times I've had a computer in for repair where the idiot owner has written down a 16 character password on a scrap of paper for me and spelled it wrong. This leads to arguments over the phone - 'you must be typing it in wrong, works for me' etc etc.

I tell them 'if you need a password to make the other dudes in your house keep their grubby hands off your property, the answer is to sort your friends out - not to waste my time with stupid password guessing'.

There's also folk who read an article about strong passwords. They change their password to something like ()&%$£KjUt1M4m7iY, write it down wrong and ask me to break their new strong password. Surely if it can be broken, its no use?

Although I know how to defeat passwords, I now tell customers 'if its got a password, its going straight in the skip'. Working so far . . .

(UK skip = US dumpster)

I've never used a password. I also won't work on a PC that has one.

These are calculations that an owner makes that aren't really known to us, but certainly don't apply to others.