Problem when restoring computer.

Question

So, what I wanted is to absolutely clean my computer from all the programs and everything. As if I wanted to sell it and configure again from zero everything. (I already saved my pictures and documents and everything I wanted to preserve separately)

So, when configuring the restore I selected to eliminate everything from all drives and reinstall windows from the cloud.

A couple hours latter after it finished, I don’t come up to the welcome page of windows, instead I am presented with the login page with my username and asking me the password to enter the desktop. So… that shouldn’t happen.

And it doesn’t ask me for my pin (as I normally used to enter into my desktop, it asked me for the password of my Microsoft account) and after I input it, I get:

Wel, that’s very odd. So I entered the safe mode and with networking options available and I could finally enter the desktop but it was all black and this warning:

It says that the computer could not find the desktop, then I launched via the task manager explorer.exe and it solved some problems, now I could see the recicle bin and the safe mode notes in the background. Then I checked the users folder but the only user I used was empty.

So I tried to create a new user in the user account window using cmd and “control userpassword2” but when I click the button of add, it just clicks but it doesn’t do anything. So I created a new user with administrator privileges using commands but when I try to enter that user it shows me an error similar to the second image.

So, what should I do? I just wanted to erase everything, start over and completely configure the computer as if i just bought it.

Notes

• I tried restoring it again but using local drive instead of downloading windows from the cloud (also because it didn’t let me because of an error) and it is still the same problem, I am welcome to the enter the desktop password, instead of the welcome page of a brand new computer.
• When I entered the desktop in safe mode I couldn’t use the windows button and no icons appeared on the icons space, not even the hour.
• I noticed that the second hard drive of 1 terabyte was completely clean but the other drive (SSD where windows is installed) didn’t change much and there is still some folders with programs that I had before resorting the PC. Why didn’t they got erased?
• The folder with the only user I have in the ssd is completely empty (last image)

Answer 1

Hello there. This is Emily.

For the scenario you are in, it is best to perform a clean install instead of trying to restore or factory reset. Factory reset only resets the system drive, thus if you have another partition or drive, it won't touch there.

Here is the instruction for clean install> https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/for...

I want to point out a few things:

1. If you are asked to enter product key, select "I don't have a product key" to continue.
2. When it is asking you where to install Windows, you will be presented a list of drives and partitions. Delete every single partition under each drive until they become one unallocated space per drive. Then you can install Windows into one of the drives (depending on which drive you want to use). This step will ensure everything is wiped clean.
3. Once install finishes and restarts, do not set up any further from there. This will allow you to give away the computer clean, so that the next user can set it up from there, for language, keyboard, user, etc.