I am trying to assist an elderly neighbor, who purchased Norton Security as his subscription was about to run out on his former version of Norton Internet Security. He signed into his Norton account to input the new product key. It would not accept it. Said it was invalid. He purchased the new Norton Security at Staples. He did a Google search for the Norton Support phone number and made the call. However, one of two possibilities may have happened. He either called the wrong number which was a scam site, or did call the correct number, and the person helping him, who was rude and told him he needed to purchase Norton Antivirus instead. He was told by the person that he could give him credit for his purchase of Norton Security, and for $99 he would sell him Norton AV, less the credit. Unfortunately, my neighbor allowed this person to take control of his laptop and proceeded to "show" him viruses and missing files on his laptop. By this time, my neighbor got suspicious, and told the person he would have to think about taking the deal offered. The person got upset, telling him that he was open for problems with security on his laptop. But my neighbor was having no issues, and had been running weekly deep scans, finding only cookies to remove.
I think this was a scam, or the Norton rep got mad and locked my neighbors hard drive before disconnecting. Because afterwards, I went over to help him after he called me for help, I then logged into his account, and the 5 new licenses were there. So I downloaded the installer, it went through its procedure, uninstalled the previous version of Nortons, then rebooted to do the install. During the reboot, before the Windows login screen, a window opened asking for a Startup Password. We tried his windows user login which didn't work. The only option is enter the password and hit OK, or reboot. After selecting reboot, since we have no usable password, it starts to reboot, the Windows 8.1 says there is a file problem and attempts to fix it. Then it brings up "Choose an option" screen. None of the options, like Refresh your PC, Reset your PC do not work, you then get a screen telling you that you need admin password, which it says doesn't exist. I can't get it to go to the "C" prompt, you can't get it into "Safe Mode", and it doesn't get far enough into the boot process to load the USB drivers either.
The only thing I can think of trying now is to remove the hard drive, put it into a hard drive dock, connect to another PC via USB, and see if I can get into system registry and try to replace the %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\config\RegBack files with a backed up version.
Does anyone here have an opinion on this? Does Norton support personnel ask to take control of a customers PC to try and troubleshoot an issue? My neighbor called Norton Tech support again using the proper number, the person was no help, but said he would have a supervisor call back at 10:00 am the yesterday the 10th of July. No one called back.
I thank you in advance for any help you can give me on this issue.
Donster