[Discuss] bios upgrade appears to have broken access to my google account and gmail

[Barbara Ellen Irwin]

Peter said:

> Request Google’s help.

> https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185834?hl=en&ref_topic=7189195 
> <https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185834?hl=en&ref_topic=7189195>

> They should be able to help you via technical support.

Hi Peter:

Just to clarify the above link turned out to be [Common issues with 2-Step Verification](https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185834?hl=en&ref_topic=7189195).

>From there I navigated to [Google account
Help](https://support.google.com/accounts/?hl=en#topic=3382296), but I
could not find any way there to actually contact a support person.

That said, one of the large number of topics accessible from Google
account Help concerned properly configuring your google account for
recovery and emphasized the alternative email address for recovery
should NOT be a gmail one.  So because I likely did not do that, and I
also don't have access to a phone that supports texting (an
alternative for recovery) this account is a classic case of being
completely unrecoverable.  And a complicating factor is I didn't know
about that recovery misconfiguration for more than a year because only
this recent BIOS upgrade somehow triggered that recovery procedure for
the first time for this account.

Therefore, my plan this afternoon is to establish a new google account
(but this time remembering to store the username, password, AND
non-gmail email account that I will be configuring for recovery).  And
then test that recovery configuration by actually recovering that
account from different computers using just those three remembered
items.  And I suggest others here with google accounts check they can
do that as well just to make sure their recovery configuration is
valid.

Alan