This instruction helps in case you forgot password from Windows account or Microsoft Live account you used to login and you cannot reset your password.
You can create a boot disk with registry editor and using this editor get the command line with administrative privileges in Windows to fix this issue. You need to be able to boot computer from USB stick.
Bootdisk can be created using Windows or Linux computer. Below I explain how to do it using Linux, but similar steps can be used in Windows environment.
Make a FAT32 partition on USB drive:
export DEV=/dev/<usb-drive>
parted ${DEV} rm 1-99
parted ${DEV} mkpart primary fat32 0% 100%
parted ${DEV} set 1 boot on
mkfs.vfat -F32 ${DEV}1
Download or install Syslinux package and use it to make disk bootable:
syslinux -i ${DEV}1
dd conv=notrunc bs=440 count=1 if=<mbr.bin> of=${DEV}
<mbr.bin> is a full path to this file which is a part of the syslinux
package.
Download offline password recovery and registry editor boot disk files. Unpack archive and copy content to the USB drive:
wget -O /tmp/usb140201.zip https://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/usb140201.zip
mkdir /tmp/ntpass
cd /tmp/ntpass
unzip /tmp/usb140201.zip
sudo mount ${DEV}1 /mnt -o uid=`whoami`
cp * /mnt
sudo umount /mnt
Now you have a USB stick that can be used to edit Windows registry.
Boot Windows computer using USB stick. See
instruction on how to
use it. You need to run registry editor on a SYSTEM hive. Then go to Setup
registry directory. Set SetupType value to 2 and CmdLine value to cmd.
Close editor and reboot Windows machine.
After a while you should see a command line console. List all users of the
system by net users. You goal is to enable Administrator user and reset its
password:
net users
net users Administrator <new-password>
net users Administrator /active:yes
You may also lock the account which password you don’t remember:
net users <username> /active:no
You can try to reset its password but if your user is authenticated using Microsoft Live account it doesn’t work.
Run regedit open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup registry directory and set
SetupType value to 0 and CmdLine value to empty string. Close the command
line window and system will be restarted. Now you should be able to login as an
Administrator using <new-password>.
After logging in as Administrator you can execute control userpassword2
command in order to edit user passwords. If account under the question is local
you can just reset its password. If it is a Microsoft Live account then the
only way is to create new user, copy all files from the old account and remove
old account.
Links: