Windows 8 lockout predicament
October 11, 2013 12:48 PM Subscribe
On my Win 8 Pro box, I had just one user: sandettie. That was in the Administrators group, of course. I made a new user, sandettieadmin, to split off admin privs to that user. I then took sandettie OUT of the admin group.
I logged out, and now it only shows sandettieadmin as an available user.
Problem: I immediately forgot the password for sandettieadmin.
There is no <-- arrow next to the sandettieadmin user in the login screen. How do I force windows to let me log on as the other user?
Pendrivelinux.com has some piece-of-cake windows applications for writing ISOs onto USB drives and making them bootable, if you're doing the above. I usually go with a utility that's in Hiren's Boot CD, but I'm sure they're more or less the same.
posted by Sunburnt at 12:58 PM on October 11, 2013
posted by Sunburnt at 12:58 PM on October 11, 2013
Try this offline NT password and registry editor.
posted by anemone of the state at 1:02 PM on October 11, 2013
posted by anemone of the state at 1:02 PM on October 11, 2013
Response by poster: I will certainly resort to the above; I was hoping for some simpler solution only because I'm away from my desktop machine until tomorrow.
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 1:02 PM on October 11, 2013
posted by sandettie light vessel automatic at 1:02 PM on October 11, 2013
Yeah, with Windows 7, you could press CTRL + ALT + DEL (if I remember correctly) to toggle to force the "other" login screen, where you could manually type in a username and password instead of just selecting from the user list. However, that doesn't seem to work in Windows 8.
I mean, if you didn't delete the other account, it should show up on the available user list. This sounds stupid, but are you sure you're not over-looking the little arrow to go "back" to the full user list?
That link also includes a registry tweak that might interest you.
Yeah, anyway, if not, then the other advice is sound. I personally prefer the Trinity Rescue Kit for this. Burn it to a CD, boot, and use the Windows user editor tool to reset the password.
posted by kbanas at 5:14 PM on October 11, 2013
I mean, if you didn't delete the other account, it should show up on the available user list. This sounds stupid, but are you sure you're not over-looking the little arrow to go "back" to the full user list?
That link also includes a registry tweak that might interest you.
Yeah, anyway, if not, then the other advice is sound. I personally prefer the Trinity Rescue Kit for this. Burn it to a CD, boot, and use the Windows user editor tool to reset the password.
posted by kbanas at 5:14 PM on October 11, 2013
Windows should allow you to create a Password Recovery Disk for future use. No help here, because you need to be logged in to the account to do this, but it is expressly designed to allow you to recover from the above situation without losing access to secured files. Offline registry editors, forcing a password change, etc. may also result in loss of encrypted data in the affected account.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:32 AM on October 12, 2013
posted by caution live frogs at 6:32 AM on October 12, 2013
This thread is closed to new comments.
If you have access to another computer with a CD burner, you can create a bootable CD that contains a program that has a very good chance of showing you the password for that user.
There is a step-by-step tutorial here:
http://pcsupport.aout.com/od/toolsofthetrade/ss/ophcracksbs.htm
I have used this for several friends who lost their passwords.
posted by DWRoelands at 12:52 PM on October 11, 2013