Windows 10 no longer recognizes PIN to login

June 22, 2021 7:14 PM

Tech wizards of Mefi, Mr. Bluesky is at his wit's end. He did the following (see inside) to a Dell laptop running WIndows 10 and now he can no longer login to his machine. We have googled and googled, many people seem to have had this problem but all the solutions we found assume you can log into windows (he can't) and other attempts outlined below have been similarly stymied. Any recommendations would be most welcome! Details below.

Here's Mr. Bluesky's description of what happened: To diagnose a slow boot up, msconfig was set to diagnostic boot. During the reboot, the machine no longer recognized the pin and the pin could not be re-set. There was only one login possibility, via the Microsoft (outlook.com) password. I changed the password on a second computer, and the Microsoft account on that second computer shows the first computer as a registered device. Nevertheless, the first no login computer does not recognize the Microsoft (outlook) password. None of the diagnostic options, safe boot types, etc, can be performed, as they all require a password which the first computer does not recognize. Seems like problem that is impossible to solve.

posted by bluesky43 to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

Are you sure it's been able to connect to the internet and see the updated password?
posted by bashing rocks together at 7:55 PM on June 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

It does sound like if you have a Microsoft account, you'll have to use Safe Mode with Networking to let it sync your credentials and log in, but it's hard to say if you've tried that.
posted by sagc at 7:58 PM on June 22, 2021

Best answer: Unless you're using full disk encryption, it's pretty easy to get a cmd window with Administrator privileges you can use to reset the password.
posted by wierdo at 8:12 PM on June 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

Was the wifi inadvertently turned off?
posted by turbid dahlia at 9:34 PM on June 22, 2021

I had the same problem. I had to create a new microsoft account to get things working again. It wouldn't take the password I had set up before. Drove me nuts.
posted by james33 at 5:49 AM on June 23, 2021

Response by poster: Thanks for the input. We plugged the computer directly into our router and as near as we can tell, the machine is connected to the internet (amber steady light and yellow blinking light google says means the machine is connected and communicating).
We tried the safe mode boot but the machine is asking for a key we don't have.
RE: the cmd window. It looks like we need a windows 10 CD to go that route, which we also don't have.
James33 - so you deleted your old microsoft account and made a new one? Could you give some details of what you did?
posted by bluesky43 at 7:10 AM on June 23, 2021

Best answer: You can download the Windows 10 installer from Microsoft's website and make a bootable USB disk if you can't burn a CD. You can also move files using a Linux LiveUSB if that's easier for you so long as you shut Windows down properly beforehand.
posted by wierdo at 9:44 AM on June 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Yellow blinky light doesn't mean you necessarily are connecting, internet-wise, if there is something funky in your network settings preventing IP getting registered, though you can check if the machine is on the network from your other connected devices via your router's admin interface.

But I second doing the USB dongle boot. Repair windows via that route, and hopefully should reset everything.
posted by rich at 9:54 AM on June 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

Can you take a picture of what sort of login screen you're seeing now? If you booted into recovery mode it might not be the account username/password that it's looking for.
posted by Aleyn at 3:00 PM on June 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

> We tried the safe mode boot but the machine is asking for a key we don't have.

When I did this recently, I got the required code by logging into my Microsoft account. Even if I couldn't log in to the machine via the Microsoft account, I could still go to my Microsoft account on a different computer, log in to Microsoft, and get this code which I then used to successfully boot into safe mode.

Your mileage may vary, of course, but it might be worth spending a little more time on this approach.
posted by flug at 2:48 AM on June 24, 2021

Best answer: Since you have access to a second computer, it may also be an option to create a bootable Linux live USB.

You can use the Linux boot to access the hard drive on your Windows computer (this is straightforward if your Windows HD is unencrypted; if it's encrypted, I'm unsure how to get around that). Then you use the "chntpw" program to reset the Windows user's password.

The answer given here shows the three commands you would need when using chntpw:

https://superuser.com/questions/1564030/reset-windows-10-password-from-linux

This might seem like a lot of effort, but it's not too bad with the right tutorials. And you can see what Linux is like (fun!).

I don't want to clutter this Ask with a bunch of links; feel free to Memail me if you'd like some help.
posted by mr_bovis at 6:21 AM on June 24, 2021

Response by poster: Thank you Tech Wizards of Mefi! A special thanks to Mr_Bovis :). Here's the updated report from Mr. Bluesky:

Thanks again for the offers to help. I indicated that you would let you know how the lock-out story ‘ended’. It ended reasonably well (so far), and this message is written on my recovered machine.

1. I followed the suggestion to use a bootable USB stick. I used the Microsoft website

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10, selected the download tool option and then the USB option.

2. With the bootable USB in my Dell Precision , I started up the machine and tapped F2 until the BIOS screen was shown. It showed a boot option other than the hard drive which I selected and saved. The machine then booted from the USB stick.

3. After the boot, I chose the Repair Windows option

4. From the options available, I chose the cmd option. The dos window (with prompt appeared for the boot USB drive “X:\windows\system32”. The NOVEL event was that the dos prompt appeared without me being asked to provide a password. With the regular boot (hard disk) that is followed by a restart to get into repair mode [hold down the shift key while restarting] I could also choose various access/repair options, among them the dos prompt, but the implementation of these options required knowledge of a password.)

4. I used dos commands to change from the X: to the c: drive, explored the drive and examined personal file sizes with the dir command. Dos worked like a charm, and I could extract a stored file from my lockout computer in which I had kept some passwords, among them a long forgotten Microsoft password that unlocked my computer.

5. The moral of the story. It seems remarkable easy to get data off a windows10 computer without having a pin or password.
posted by bluesky43 at 5:23 PM on June 29, 2021 [1 favorite]