EasyCapture169.jpg' alt='Hirens Boot Restored Edition' title='Hirens Boot Restored Edition' />SOLUTION This is Microsoft Support telephone scam Computer ransom lockout. A trend of the past couple of years has been for scammers to contact computer owners directly via telephone in the United States in an effort to convince them that there is a problem with their PC and theyll need to pay to have it fixed. 3D Qsar Software As A Service there. In general, these people cannot fix anything, and instead they merely charge exorbitant fees for absolutely nothing. In other words, they scam you. The call generally goes something like this A foreigner with a thick Indian accent identifies himself as a member of Microsoft Support or similar. He informs you that you have a number of critical problems with your PC and that you will need to have it fixed. To convince you, he offers to connect remotely and pulls up your Event Log eventvwr. He then filters for Warnings, Errors, and Critical events and uses that as evidence that your PC will soon fail to work correctly if you do not pay him to correct it. The astute among you have probably already sensed that something here is seriously wrong, and its not your PC. Its the fact that someone is calling you to tell you there is a problem with your computer. No one will ever do that. The only way they could possibly know there is a problem is by hacking or guessing. In this case, its mere guesswork, and its not even correct most of the time. The Event Log is supposed to log warnings and errors, and even on the healthiest of PCs there are plenty of Error Events that can be safely ignored, as they often dont amount to anything. The important thing to remember is to never trust someone who calls you about a problem with your PC, and never, EVER let them connect remotely to your PC. If you do make the mistake of letting them connect, but then you happen to get cold feet and refuse to pay the 1. This scammer proceeded to actually follow through on his promise of the PC not working if they dont agree to have him fix it, and so in a few quick steps, behind the users back, he enacted what is known as Sys. Key encryption on the SAM registry hive. Windows XP Free Download Live CD ISO bootable image. Download Windows XP Live CD ISO bootable image full version installer. Windows XP is an operating system. SAFE hard drive recovery steps to SAVE money. We give Tech advice not sell our own data recovery service or software we assess help you with those for your. Everyone is freaking out about the season seven premiere of Game of Thronesand youre totally behind. Dont worry, you can catch up and be ready to watch with. How to recover deleted files for free If youve accidentally deleted files you might be able to get them back using some free software. We help you find deleted. DLC-Boot-2016-v3.1-Final.png' alt='Hirens Boot Restored Edition' title='Hirens Boot Restored Edition' />Hirens Boot DVD es una compilacin de utilidades que a cualquier profesional o aficionado a la administracin de sistemas le ser de gran provecho. Dicha. Sys. Key encryption is a little known feature of Windows which allows administrators to lock out access to the Security Accounts Manager SAM registry hive so that login specifics cannot be stolen and the PC cannot be accessed without knowing the proper credentials. The problem is, unlike other scams, there is no way around the problem you cant simply remove the password, as the actual SAM hive has been encrypted entirely by the process. If your Windows installation has had Sys. Key activated, youll see the following message Startup Password. This computer is configured to require a password in order to start up. SejvPW9E1yQ/hqdefault.jpg' alt='Hirens Boot Restored Edition' title='Hirens Boot Restored Edition' />Please enter the Startup Password below. The window which appears looks like this The ONLY solution is to find a clean copy of the registry hives from before this occurred. This scammer knew this, however, and as such, he took an extra step to block any repair or recovery attempts he deleted all System Restore points on the machine, which normally house backup copies of the registry hives. Unfortunately for him, Im a much better technician. When the customer suspected foul play and decided to call me instead of proceeding, I immediately instructed them to power off the PC. Heres how I fixed the problem without having to reinstall Windows. FIRST, ensure you dont have any Restore Points to work with Check to ensure that the folder SYSTEMROOTsystem. Reg. Back exists. This is the folder which contains the last known good backup of the hives following a boot. If it exists, continue. If not, stop and consider contacting a technician instead. Reboot the PC and repeatedly press F8 to reach the Advanced Startup Options menu. Choose Repair your Computer from the menu. Cancel the automatic repair attempt and instead instruct the system to perform a System Restore to a date prior to the incident occurring. If no Restore Points exist, your scammer intentionally removed them to prevent this from occurring. If this happens to you, follow these additional steps to resolve the problem POWER OFF your PC immediately. Boot to external media of some sort NOT your Windows installation and navigate to the SYSTEMROOTsystem. Backup the registry hives in this folder to a temporary location. The files are. SOFTWARESYSTEMSAMSECURITYDEFAULTNavigate to SYSTEMROOTsystem. Reg. Back as mentioned earlier. Copy all registry hives from this folder the same files as listed above into the SYSTEMROOTsystem. Reboot the PC. This solution only works if you have not already tried to reboot the PC subsequently. If you have, it may still work, but that is entirely dependent upon whether or not Windows created a new Reg. Back copy following a successful boot. In the case of my customer, it worked, and they were back in Windows, just like it never happened. Nice try, scammer. Youll have to try harder to beat me though. Addendum A update 62. Thanks to FUScammers for pointing out this more involved, alternate method of actually removing the SAM encryption. Download this file and burn the. CD. Boot to the CD on the affected system. Follow the instructions to select the proper system drive and partition NTFS is the partition type you are looking for. Type the path to the registry files its most likely Windowssystem. Choose option 1 for Password reset sam system security. Choose option 2 for Syskey status  change. Confirm that you wish to disable Syskey, then quit and confirm writing the new changes to the hive. Reboot the PC and check. For more detailed instructions, check out this link scroll down to How to disable Syskey startup password http computernetworkingnotes. In Windows 8, the GPT partition type makes the use of this utility impossible. However, you can still manually copy the hives to a supported filesystem NTFS or FAT3. I can confirm that this method does work and that even in Windows 8. Donate to say Thanks if this post has helped save you time and moneySlow to boot, login, load. Solved. OK, I asked for specifications to have a better idea of how fast it should run and what could possibly be making it run so slow. As for whats attached I meant what devices are connected to the IO panel because you described it as a desktop PC which can have externally connected devices such as keyboard, mouse, monitor, USB devices, as well as PCI connections. IO device error. On a laptop IO devices described here can be the usual devices youd normally have externally connected on a PC. They can be touchpad, ten key pad, a USB Pendrive, USB Hard Disk, any device connected to USB port. IO InputOutput device in Windows which is not written specifically for either PC or Laptop just computers. FIX Windows 7 Slow Boot Startup Process Due to So Many System Restore Pointshttp www. Some google results related to The request could not be performed because of an IO device error. The request could not be performed because of an IO device error. ERRORIODEVICEhttp www. ERRORIODEVICE 1. X4. DYou may want to try Advanced System Care link on this pagehttp blog. Error Code 0x. 45d http www. BSOD, error 0x. 45d, windows 7, now wont boot at allhttp www. Possible error codes 0xffffffffc. A search for previous error codes produces this link http www. The comments in techsupport forum mention Norton antivirus as the possible cause for long boot times. This reminds me of a booting problem I recently had that woul also cause all my web browsers to constantly crash. The frequent booting problems affected all boot devices HDD Optical drives, Live CD, Installation Disk all would return errors almost everytime. I would get either a blue screen with error codes that pointed to a device error, RAM error, etc. My antivirus was having trouble updating sometimes, so I unistalled it with Revo Uninstaller and reinstalled the Antivirus clean, and all problems were solved. My antivirus is Avast and in Techsupport they mention Norton. The antivirus monitors all system activities apparently including the boot process, so it would be adviceable to remove your antivirus and either install it clean or install another one. I would advice this even if youre not having any antivirus related problems, because I didnt think mine was the cause since I had experienced the updating problem before, but the final result made it clearly evident that antivirus corruption was the whole problem.