My laptop came with Windows 8 pre-installed and uses UEFI (the successor to BIOS) by default. It has been working fine for me for a few months. I decided to install Ubuntu with the goal of a conventional dual-boot setup. I disabled Windows 8's Secure Boot and Fast Startup features to avoid any problems these might cause and shrunk my primary partition by 13 GB from within Windows 8 so that there would be some free space in which to install Ubuntu. I downloaded Ubuntu 12.04.3 on a separate Linux machine and used the ISO file to create a bootable USB drive with Startup Disk Creator. Then I booted my Windows 8 laptop from the USB drive, and successfully installed Ubuntu in the previously allocated free space. Then, dumb me, I immediately forgot my new password. When I reboot my machine it always brings me to Ubuntu without any prompts. I tried entering recovery mode to reset my Ubuntu password, but when I try pressing or holding the left Shift key at any point during the boot sequence, the boot sequence simply continues uninterrupted. The page about recovery mode linked to in the previous sentence says that if I restart (as opposed to power down and power back on), I should meet with a prompt to enter recovery mode, but I don't. Any suggestions that would (a) enable me to boot Windows 8, (b) enable me to recover my password, and/or (c) enable me to re-install Ubuntu completely would be greatly appreciated. I have read that running Boot Repair would enable me to boot Windows 8, but as far as I understand that requires super user privileges (sudo).