Windows 8.1 Factory Reset

[Jose_E_Chavez]

Is it possible to do a factory reset or system restore with a Windows 8.1 OS and not erase the OS in the process too, as to evade having to reinstall it via a recovery disk/usb image etc.? I’ve owned the computer that is cause for this question for a long time and just recently the hard drive crashed beyond repair. Being it’s so old, I wasn’t looking to put much if any money into it at all. A day or two ago I was telling my buddy about it and it just so happened that he had a 500gb HD that would fit just fine. We put it in today and appears to be working fine but has a login in password screen.  The HD came out of an old laptop that belonged to his sister a handful of years ago.  We were able to get ahold of her but none of the passwords she thought it might be ended up being correct. So at the login screen, while holding shift I reset it and got it into recovery mode.  I’m not seeing a way to completely reset it without erasing Windows along with it and don’t know if it’s even possible to completely wipe the HD clean of everything but the installed OSi. And if not, is there another method to “hack” the login screen outside of a reset and that doesn’t require any of

[CherylG]

@Jose_E_Chavez 

A factory reset erases the entire Windows partition and installs a fresh copy of Windows. However, the hdd being from another machine it is likely to fail or refuse to install. The recovery files, which also contain a license key, are locked to the original machine it came out of and it will check BIOS to see if it is installing on the correct machine.

If you made your Recovery USB or DVD it would be best to boot from it and do the fresh install.

Microsoft also offers a free Windows 8.1 ISO download. You can use it to create a bootable usb flash drive and install Windows using it. It should retrieve your license key from BIOS during installation.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows8ISO