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A friend of mine has accidentally lost her windows 8 password. I tried booting a live USB Hiren's & Windows windows unlocker enterprise (windows xp based live disks). The problem is that the normal mode is UEFI based (in BIOS) and it does not allow to boot Legacy OS (like xp). But when I enable "legacy mode", it disables the UEFI mode so Rescue CD's dont show the internal hard disk of laptop.

Any help ?

Gagan93
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3 Answers3

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What you could try, is boot into a Ubuntu Live OS and:

  1. Rename C:\windows\system32\Utilman.exe to C:\windows\system32\Utilman.exe.bak
  2. Rename C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe to C:\windows\system32\Utilman.exe
  3. Load back into windows, and click the 'Ease of access' button on the logon screen, and command promt should now open.
  4. Type: net user ###### * (replace hashes with the username)
  5. Give them a new password
Just Lucky Really
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    thats quite clever and nice trick ! ;) – Gagan93 Apr 29 '14 at 10:46
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    Just remember to rename the programs back to Utilman.exe and cmd.exe :D – Just Lucky Really Apr 29 '14 at 16:50
  • clever trick indeed! but before you should take ownership of the these .exe files in system32 directory as by default it is trustedinstaller and then set permissions to full control in order to be able to rename them –  Oct 10 '14 at 04:07
  • Nah if you boot into Linux, it ignores all windows permissions. You could delete the entire System32 folder if you like Lol – Just Lucky Really Oct 10 '14 at 15:08
  • This answer works much more reliably than the popular chntpw alternative, since it uses Windows tools for resetting password. chntpw, e.g., doesn't work with non-latin user names, and has been reported to sometimes not actually reset password despite apparent success. – Ruslan Aug 10 '16 at 09:42
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You can perform the password reset using the Windows 8 installation media.

Here is an article explaining all the required steps to do so :

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows-8/a/reset-password-windows-8.htm

Hope this helps !

Ob1lan
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I have been using Trinity Rescue Kit quite successfully to reset Windows 8 local user password, bring local users into an administrator group, etc.

Just burn the ISO to a CD, enable Legacy Boot in BIOS, boot up the that CD and then go to "Windows Password Resetting" option.

ruslaniv
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