[niccolai]

My father passed away about 2 months ago, so I inherited his business laptop

It's a HP probook 4510s with Windows Vista Business on it.


Here's the issue; I didn't know his password. I couldn't do a factory reset on it with f11 to reinstall windows from scratch because the HP business notebooks have some encryption protection thing that stops you from doing that if you can't log in.


So i switched the boot order to DVD drive first, and popped in a Vista basic CD, formatted the hardrive, and tried installing vista basic.

It gets to the finalizing step and just sits there for a few hours until the screen goes black (which it sits there forever)

If you try to boot the computer, it goes to the windows loading screen and sits there for hours until you restart it and it tells you 'windows can not boot, insert windows disk and select scan for problems/repair'

When you do that, the scan for problems search just searches forever and doesn't do anything or produce a log.




What can I do to get an OS on this thing?

Did I remove important drivers or something by trying to formt vista buisiness and instal vista basic over it?