Administrative permissions denied and BIOS settings unavailable

April of 2013 I bought my four children each a Gateway laptop computer, their older brother had just committed suicide and I thought I would get the computers as something to take their minds off of the recent loss.

The computers are Gateway laptops with "NE56R31u" at the top of the serial number tag. These computers came with windows 8.1 installed on them. I have muddled my way through win 8 so far but I don't think I will ever get used to it or be proficient with it as I was with 95, Me, 2000 and XP.

I am on here because I have run across something so far out of my knowledge base that I honestly am not even sure "what" could be wrong.

My 12 yr old son was getting a bit confused trying to use his computer this afternoon, he was unable to view any files on C drive suddenly it gave him a "you do not have permissions to access this" message. He was able to open properties on C drive and it showed him 0 bytes used and 0 bytes free space available on his 300 Gigabyte drive.

I found that odd so I accessed some pictures video etc and was able to view and play them so obviously the hard drive was functional. I then went to check permissions and was not allowed to view anything of permissions or settings of any kind.

My next move was to run a restore point, but we did not have permissions to run that. All permissions have been removed from the administrator account, one cannot install/uninstall, read any files or access anything that can allow changes to be made to the computer.

The next move was to go online and research this type of problem, I found instructions for resetting the password and went through that starting in safe mode and attempted to open a new profile and change permissions, but even in safe mode there was no access to anything that would allow change, even the task manager is unable to run.

Next I found some software called pc unlocker and downloaded that and set the ISO up on a 32 gig USB drive. I attempted to change the boot selection in BIOS but when I finally managed to get into BIOS and it showed no options at all for boot selection, just blank, with the instructions above to use the "arrow" keys and "enter" to select from the "nonexistent" list, the boot device.

I then read that Win 8 has a secure boot on some systems that are factory installed and I thought that maybe what was going on, though his computer in the past has tried to boot from the CDRom if he left a cd in there when he turned it off. I went ahead and removed the hard drive and then tried to boot and access the BIOS boot menu again, but to no avail, I still get the blank screen with just the instructions on how to navigate and select from the "non existent" boot list.

I have not as yet attempted to access the boot list on the other computers which are identical, they may be blocked as well I don't know.

After the kids are off their comps I will attempt to see if they have boot options on their computers. If they do not, I may just go ahead and drop one of their hard drives into his computer and see effect that has, remove the potential of a bad controller or something.

Does anyone have a clue what I may be dealing with on this? Any tricks to forcing access that you know of?

 

Greetings MountainGuardian, and welcome to MajorGeeks.

Sorry for your loss.

Those would be my next steps - the results of those tests should provide valuable info. Are these OEM computers, brand new? And, did they come with recovery disks? If not, did you make recovery disks?

Hang in there, and be patient - I'm sure others will jump in with good suggestions. Good luck.

 

It certainly looks like malware, but rather than go through the whole palaver of trying to eradicate it, and as these computers are newish, much better to restore to factory. There will be a recovery partition, usually invoked with a F key at boot. You may be able to find the procedure by examining the Start screen of one of the other similar machines.

 

Maybe this will help -

https://panam.gateway.com/s/software/MICROSOF/vista/7515418/7515418su531.shtml

 

This sounds like either the hard disk is on its way out, or the registry has been by malware.

I also second the suggestion of doing a clean install.