# Disabling F11 recovery in HP BIOS



## datkinson27707 (Jan 18, 2008)

have 3 HP Pavilion desktops in my house (home office and kids) - and I now find that the F11 --> System Recovery/Restore cannot be password protected, and is an end run around BIOS passwords and Windows user accounts ...

I have a teen who has figured out he can use System Restore to travel through time and evade user/software controls I have on the kids Vista PC, and eventually (twice in 6 months) I have to recover back to factory settings as the time-space continuum (or at least Windows Vista) gets corrupted ... the backdoor to System Restore is used to install & run software, evading Vista administrative privileges and settings ...

An HP tech support Mgr today admitted there should be a password required, but apparently not many other parents have found their teens doing this so no horde is clamoring for an HP padlock on the backdoor ...

Only "solution" I have to the F11 backdoor is to disable System Restore within Vista so that it's not there to access through the backdoor.

Anybody got a way to password protect the F11 access? I would love to solve this without deleting the HP Recovery Partition where a minimal version of Windows lives to be summoned via F11 ...


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## Doby (Jan 17, 2006)

Very interesting and something I have never thought of and suprised I have not run into with a customer.
Did you create the restore disks for the computer using the hp software?

If so I can't think of any reason you would need the restore partition, with these disks you could always reinstall the operating system if necassary.


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## datkinson27707 (Jan 18, 2008)

Thanks.

Was just wondering if there was a solution short of destroying the restore partition ... still can't believe HP chooses to circumvent all password (BIOS, Windows) and allows open access to a tool that resets the machine ...

Oh well ... will destroy the partition ...


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## tke_0125 (Aug 17, 2008)

it is got other way to change the f11 key to other key for recovery?


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