Sun Coast Amateur
Radio Club Society

This is an old revision of the document!

Yesterday, the Echolink computer froze mid-net. I tried to restart it, but it kept rebooting into the BIOS. Here's an outline of what I tried and to re-install Windows.

From a working Windows computer, I downloaded Windows 11 from the Create Windows 11 Installation Media section and created a USB boot drive.
I booted the Echolink computer using the USB boot drive and tried to “Troubleshoot” the computer (see section 3 of these instructions). Unfortunately, that option wasn't available.
Before trying to re-install Windows, I had to find the Windows Product key.
- If Windows was working, I could have used regedit, navigate to Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SoftwareProtectionPlatform, and lookup BackupProductKeyDefault. (See Method 3 from these instructions for more details)
- But I couldn't boot into Windows so I used a Linux Mint USB boot drive and tried to sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM | tail -1, but the MSDM file didn't exist. I tried that command on in my personal computers and it worked so I made notes of these keys. (See these instructions for more details.
- Finally, I installed reglookup on the Linux boot drive and ran
```
reglookup -p "/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/SoftwareProtectionPlatform/BackupProductKeyDefault" \
[MountPoint]/Windows/System32/config/SOFTWARE 
```
  (See these instructions for more details.)
I instead tried to re-install Windows 11 from scratch, but it again booted to the BIOS.
I used a Linux Mint boot USB drive that I had to load GParted and delete every partition on the Echolink computer. I then reinstalled Windows