A buddy gave me a HP Pavilion ze4900 & it won't boot & the bios is locked

[Micahe]

A buddy gave me a laptop...hasn't used it in. Long time because it needed a charger. I bought a charger & pluged it up & the cmos flashed for a sec asking if I wanted to change boot order or enter setup..then went to a black screen. I can only see anything on the screen when I hit esc & being the cmos up. Unfortunately it's password protected... after 3 tries I got system is locked [13020] what do I do? Please help

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

See if entering this unlock passcode works for you...

kkxanjg

[Micahe]

No sir. After three try's it gave the same number as before

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Sorry that code didn't work.

The only other suggestion I can offer would be to try this code...

avwalqt

[Micahe]

Well that unlocked the bios. But as soon as the press escape to change the boot order & so on the screen goes grey...if I hit f8 it won't load either. The message it's giving me is "Window could not start because the following file is missing or corrupted. <windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe please reinstall a copy of the file.

[Micahe]

I have to tell you I'm stumped...got in the bios & changed the password....but it still doesn't do anything when you turn it on...grey screen. I've run two scans on the harddrive through tbs bios utility if you keep hammering on f8 it will bring up the safe mode options & no matter what optiom you pick if goes to fbs geeg

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Sounds to me like you need to reinstall the operating system.

[Micahe]

Yeah, unfortunately on my computer that works I only have flash drives....no CD burner...so I'm having a hard time trying to figure out how to get it to boot so I can download windows ten

[Paul_Tikkanen]

I will be very surprised if the hardware that old PC has will be able to run W10.

I don't believe W10 will even install on that machine.