HP Fingerprint ScannerYou startup your HP laptop with a fingerprint scanner, and suddenly you get the following error trying to login:

HRESULT Error 0x8007ffff

You never setup the fingerprint scanner, and you most likely don’t have (or never set) a password. I’ve run into this problem a couple of times and a number of suggested solutions online are overkill.

Here is how I’ve run into this before:

  1. User forgets their login password. You use WinPE or another rescue CD to clear their Windows Login Password and restart. You get this error immediately or when you try to login to that account.
  2. You reinstall windows on the laptop. To save time, you don’t set a password given how many times it’ll restart. After installing the latest HP updates using HP Support Assistant, you restart and get this error, unable to login.

The solution is fairly easy. Restart into safe mode (Press F8 during bootup) and open the User Accounts tool in the Control Panel (Start->Control Panel->User Accounts). It should allow you to set a password. Save it and restart. Now you should be able to login properly.

If this doesn’t work, then you may need to uninstall HP Protect Tools, restart and set a password, then reinstall HP Protect Tools.

WARNING!!!

If the computer is using the HP encryption to encrypt files, then you probably will lose access to those files if you mess around with HP Protect Tools. Of course, if you cleared the Windows password, you may have lost access already. Recovering from a corrupted encryption setup is beyond the scope of this. But make absolutely sure you haven’t encrypted anything before clearing passwords or uninstalling Protect Tools!