So, I've been doing IT work on the side since the early '90's after forcing myself into a situation of having to learn some CAD.
I've always held that computers were invented by Satan since my early engineering-school years in the early '70's, or at least programming by His minions...I have ample evidence, you know.
Anyway, last week an acquaintance brought a laptop in to me they had tried to "clean up" by restoring and had run into serious problems. I suspect there is more of a backstory, but unforseen events happening to ordinary humans is one of the reasons I make many, many pennies every week, so I said I'd service it. It was a middling-aged Dell Inspiron laptop that shipped with Windows 8 and a UEFI BIOS, and somehow or other, the BIOS had been locked (the klaxons begin to blare, enough people "forget" this that it's almost always a really stupid move in any remotely physically-secure location). Ouchie.
So now we have an unbootable OS on an HDD (that will also not boot into its recovery environment mode) that's keyed into a BIOS that is locked against reconfiguration,- OR BOOT SELECTION. Nothing straightforward is possible here. The faint of heart would immediately bail and scrap this. To an idiot like me, this is a technical challenge- because all the science tells me this is simply an engineering problem (implying an actual solution)...It does not accept any of the keygen passwords, which are the same (mostly) as the ones Dell techs can come up with, so my thought was to inject several tools into the RE partition (there is plenty of room there) and continue patching the boot partition to get it to at least boot into recovery mode. I can run stuff from the command line to wipe and update the CMOS. THEN everything else is straightforward. Perhaps not easy, but straightforward, and it doesn't entail replacing the motherboard, the ultimate solution a very decent Manish at Dell suggests after an hour of online chat (he very quickly understood I am not clueless on the deeper tech, and responded based on that).
The GPT partition layout of 6 partitions is appropriate, and I have run the normal Windows commands to batch the boot routine- at least now it's erroring out to a blue-screen for a second or two instead of dumping straight to the UEFI screen.
If anyone has any ideas or just wants to laugh hysterically, please comment.