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How to exit System Audit Mode without CMD or Logging in
My Windows 10 laptop won't boot from my USB sticks. I have 2 bootable sticks, one created via the official Microsoft Media Creation tool, the other one via Rufus. I tested both on another laptop and it was able to boot fine from them. I'm trying to trace back to what I did that could have screwed it up while I was trying to trouble shoot mind boggling installation issues and I've came to the conclusion that I screwed up by doing this (see below), and I'm wondering how to reverse it WITHOUT access to the Start menu or command prompt....I think i need to get out of System Audit Mode...I really didn't have much idea what I was doing, just trying to back track when everything went south so hopefully I could try to fix it...
- Run C:\Windows\System32\sysprep\sysprep.exe
- Change “System Cleanup Action” to “Enter System Audit Mode”
- Click OK to reboot
A bit of back story if it helps:
I was trying to install Windows 10, it threw a Windows cannot complete this installation error.
So I googled for solutions and tried two typical solutions involving creating a user account in CMD, they didn't work so I googled further and
I ran into this article about messing with the System Audit Mode which I should never have. Because it made the problem worse, instead of just throwing an error that it couldn't complete installation, it goes right to the Welcome/Login screen, and when I try to log in it just gives the error "The specified domain either does not exist ". So I thought i should just forget about this whole Windows 10 thing and reinstall Windows 8.1 but then my laptop won't boot from them (Yes, I made sure they are booting from USB, not in safe mode, and the laptop does not have the option to change to/from legacy to UDFI(?) mode)
P.S the reason why I can't used CMD now after I have messed with the System Audit Mode is because I can't log in, Shift+F10 doesn't work anywhere, and the only other option via system repair is asking for the password for Defaultuser0 which doesn't exist...so I'm stuck in a loop.
Thank you in advance for your help.
Last edited by Op88; 14 Aug 2017 at 23:51.