Help! Login has disappeared when I boot

If you want to keep Windows 10, and the recovery drive is for Windows 8, booting from it isn't going to help things. Also, if it is an actual recovery drive created by the OEM utility on the PC, odds are it is just going to erase everything on the drive and restore a factory image. It will erase all partitions and create new ones. For me it wouldn't work after swapping hard drives on my ASUS laptop. I went from a large spinner drive to a smaller SSD though. Not to a bigger drive.
Your going to have to sort out how to access the BIOS to get anywhere though. You had it open to swap drives, so have another look and see if you can unplug the battery from the motherboard. Are you sure its F8?

ship69 said:

OK I've discovered F2 seems to open BIOS. Although it seems very basic Samsung thing and I'm not sure how I'm going to get it to boot off anything other than its SSD. It doesn't seem to pay any attention to the memory stick so I'm going to try to create a Windows 10 DVD and see how far I can get with that...

If I get the PC to boot off a Windows DVD, will I be able to format the C: drive and start again with a virgin copy of Windows 10 on it? In fact will that be the only way forward for me?

@ship69

While in the BIOS, look for settings that will say something like:

Boot order

Boot sequence

Boot device

You can change the order of what the BIOS looks for first to boot from. Based on you question about booting from the DVD, you would want to set the CD/DVD device to be first in sequence, followed by the SSD. The names can get a little confusing in the BIOS, depends who's BIOS it is. But your looking for something that looks like it should be the CD/DVD device. You manual might tell you. Always have the CD/DVD first, even though it may be empty. The system will look for it, and then your SSD, and boot up. Will boot from DVD if it inserted.

Hard to give exact instructions without seeing your screens. Only way to see them would be for you to use a camera/phone and post the pic.

Look around in there and see what you can find.

TC

I use option 2 here diskpart, to create my bootable thumb drives, https://www.eightforums.com/tutorial...e-windows.html Just substitute the Windows 10 ISO for the Windows 8 one. Just take your time and make sure you select the correct drive. Works for UEFI and legacy. How did you create the DVD and where did you get your ISO from?

What I usually do on a clean install is select the custom option, which gets you access to the disk tools. Then I delete all the partitions and just install to the unallocated space. Windows will create all the partitions it needs automatically, even the hidden system partitions. The only partition/drive I don't touch is my DATA drive. I keep my user folders, Documents, Pictures etc on a separate drive. I just leave that intact and delete the rest.

Kerry, his DVD drive is external, assume USB. Is that a problem with trying to boot from?