Solved: win 7 boot password & drive

Running win 7 on a 3 year old Dell Inspiron. Left the machine on overnight Tuesday. Wednesday morning it was showing the enter password login screen. I assumed it downloaded updates overnight & rebooted. Would not accept password & when I clicked forgot password it said to install the floppy or USB device that contained the password record. That's when I noticed it was showing drive d instead of c. Restarted, F12, changed boot order to hd, save, exit. Aaaand it's still showing drive d. Repeated steps many times with no difference. When I hit F2, it shows the hd in first place. When I hit F12, it shows floppy/USB in first. Win7 repair disc finds no problems. Tell me I don't gotta reinstall.

 

Try using system restore to go back to a day before the updates were installed. You should be able to access it from the Windows 7 Disk but i can't tell you how to do it because i've never used it from the cd.

 

My bad...should have said I already tried that but no difference. New wrinkle: came home last night and neither the mouse or keyboard worked (wireless). Batteries good, tried different ports. Restarted. No dice. Drug out an old wired keyboard and it worked. Decided to reinstall before anything else weird happened. Not that much on hd. Important stuff already backed up. Now it's all bright & shiny, new & fast...and empty. It's software installation Saturday here! Woo-hoo!

 

So you decided to reinstall windows & it solved all your problems. If so make sure you mark this thread as solved.

FYI: A password on a windows user account is not necessary or required if your the only person using it. If you share the computer with other people & don't want them accessing your files & programs then go right ahead & use a password. If you set a password make sure you create a password reset disk before you forget what it is again. This microsoft site will tell you how to do it. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-password-reset-disk#1TC=windows-7

If you ever decided to get rid of your windows password here's how http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/ht/remove-windows-7-password.htm