Author Archives: admin

How to Reset Windows Local Password with Parted Magic

Parted Magic is a Linux-based bootable disk with disk partitioning & cloning tools. In this tutorial we’ll show you how to create a Parted Magic Live CD (or USB) and use it to reset forgotten local account password for Windows operating system.

How to Reset Windows Local Password with Parted Magic?

Download the ISO image of Parted Magic and use your favorite burning software (for instance, ISO2Disc) to burn it to an empty CD (or USB thumb drive).
Boot your computer from the Parted Magic LiveCD. The first screen you’ll see a list of options. Select the default option as it works with most computers.
When booted to the desktop, click on the Parted Magic button located at the left bottom corner. Select Rescue and then click Change Windows Password.
You’ll be prompted to pick a method to change or reset your password, click the “Not Hibernated – Windows PC was Shut Down” option.
Next select your Windows installation that was detected by Parted Magic.
This will start the built-in chntpw utility. Type 1 and press Enter to select “Edit user data and passwords“.
You’ll see all Windows user names shown on the screen. Type the RID of that account you want to reset password for, and hit Enter.
Type 1 and hit Enter if you want to remove the password for your selected user.
Now that you’ve cleared the local password. Type q to exit the User Edit Menu.
Type q to quite the chntpw program.
Type y to save your password reset changes back to disk.

Reboot your computer and eject Parted Magic LiveCD, you can then log in to Windows local account without a password! That’s it!

Reset Forgotten Microsoft Account Password for Windows 10 / 8

Couldn’t sign into your Microsoft account and locked out of your computer? Is it possible to go back to a regular account if your Microsoft account is hacked? This tutorial shows you 2 ways to reset forgotten Microsoft account password for Windows 10 or 8, quickly regain admin access to your computer without losing files or reinstalling.

forgot-microsoft-account-password

Method 1: Reset Microsoft Account Password Online

What to do if you forgot Windows 10 or 8 Microsoft account password? You can use any device that is connected to the Internet and reset your Microsoft account password from Microsoft’s website:

Open the Microsoft Account Password Reset page from any browser on any computer or device, even your smartphone.
Select the “I forgot my password” option, then click Next.
Type the email address of your Microsoft account then enter the captcha code that appears. Click Next.
Choose how you want to receive the security code: alternative email address or phone number associated with your Microsoft account, and click Send code.

If you don’t remember the full email address or phone number, you have to click “I don’t have any of these“, fill out a questionnaire to help Microsoft account team identify you.
An email message containing a security code will be sent to your alternative email address immediately. If you choose to receive security code via phone, you should receive a text message instead. Bear in mind that the code is only valid for a short period of time (somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes) before it expires.
Enter the security code you just received and then click Next.
Now it’s time to reset your Microsoft account password. The password you type must be at least 8 characters long. After you confirm it, click Next. You should see the “Your account has been recovered” screen.

You should be able to log in to your Windows 10/8 computer with your new Microsoft account password. Remember that Internet connection is required for the computer to accept your new password.

Method 2: Switch Microsoft Account to Local Account Offline

If you’re still unable to regain access to your Microsoft account, you might have to switch back to a local account. PCUnlocker is the right software that helps switching Microsoft account to local account offline and reset your lost Windows password. Here’s how:

Download the PCUnlocker program (zipped ISO file) using a working computer with Internet access. After you’ve downloaded it, extract to a local folder and you’ll see the CD image: pcunlocker.iso.
Download and install the free USB creator software Rufus, plug a USB flash drive into your machine. From the Rufus program, select your USB drive, click the CD-ROM icon to choose the pcunlocker.iso file you want to burn, and then choose “GPT partition scheme for UEFI“. Click Start.
Once the USB drive is ready, take it to boot off your locked Windows 10/8 computer. When you get to the PCUnlocker program, you’ll see that a local account is linked to the email address of your Microsoft account. Select that account and click on Reset Password.
Click Yes to confirm your password removal. The program will convert your Microsoft account to a local account and remove the existing password.
Reboot your computer and unplug the USB drive. You can then log into the converted local account without a password! All your files are right where you’ve left them.

2 Options to Change Standard User to Administrator in Windows

How to change an existing standard user to an administrator account? Looking for a way to promote a limited account to administrator without knowing admin password? In this article I’ll show you 2 ways to change standard user to administrator in Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista and XP.

Option 1: Using Command Prompt

This method is quite easy but it requires you to log on to Windows with admin account. Here’s how to change standard user to an administrator from Command Prompt:

Before getting started, you need to open an elevated Command Prompt. In Windows 7/Vista/XP, click on Start, then Accessories, and then right-click on the Command Prompt and select “Run as administrator“. In Windows 10 or 8, this can be done by just pressing the Windows key + X together and then select “Command Prompt (Admin)“.
Type the following command at the Command Prompt and hit Enter. Replace Jame with the name of your standard account.
net localgroup Administrators Jame /add
Now you’ve successfully changed a standard/limited user to administrator.

Option 2: Using Offline NT Password & Registry Editor

Lost administrator privileges and you can log on with standard account only? It’s possible that you’ve forgotten the admin password or the user profile of admin account is corrupt. Offline NT Password & Registry Editor is an easy-to-use tool in the form of a bootable Linux CD that can elevate a standard/limited user into an administrator. Here’s how:

Before getting started, you need to download the ISO image of Offline NT Password & Registry Editor and burn it to a CD using another computer.
Boot your problematic PC from the CD (you might have to adjust the BIOS to allow booting from the CD). When you’re presented with a boot prompt, just hit Enter.
Find the number of the partition that contains your Windows installation and type it in. Press Enter.
Now you have to select which part of registry to be loaded. Hit Enter to accept the default option – password reset [SAM].
On chntpw Main Interactive Menu, type 1 to select Edit user data and passwords option.
Type in the user name whom you want to make the administrator. For example, if you want to change Jame to an administrator account, so type Jame and press Enter.
Type 3 and press Enter to select “Promote user (make user an administrator)“.
Press q to exit chntpw and then type Y to save the changes back to registry.
Before reboot the computer, you have to remove the CD first. Otherwise, it will boot to this program again. Reboot the system and now you can log on your account with admin rights.

How to Reset Lost Surface Pro / Book Password

Forgot Windows password for your Surface Pro tablet or Surface Book laptop? If you’ve tried the free password recovery tools such as Offline NT Password & Registry or Ophcrack, you’ll find that they don’t work on your Surface due to lack of UEFI support.

PCUnlocker Enterprise is a great Windows password bypass tool that is capable of booting in UEFI mode directly if burned to a CD or USB stick. In this tutorial we’ll show you how to use it to reset lost Surface Pro / Book password from a USB drive. It works with Surface Book, Surface Pro, Surface Pro 2/3/4 and other UEFI-based computers/laptops/tablets.

How to Reset Lost Surface Pro / Book Password?

Before resetting Surface password, you need to create a PCUnlocker USB drive from another computer you have access to. Download the ZIP file of PCUnlocker Enterprise (trial version) to your local hard drive. When the download is complete, extract the contents of the ZIP file and you should see an ISO file called pcunlocker.iso.

Download and install the bootable USB creation tool – ISO2Disc (or Rufus). With your USB thumb drive plugged in, launch ISO2Disc. Click on Browse button to select the ISO file from the destination folder where you extracted the downloaded PCUnlocker ZIP file. Click on “Burn to USB Flash Drive” and select your USB drive, next choose “GPT (required for UEFI boot)”.

Click on Start Burn. Wait until ISO2Disc utility erases your USB drive and transfers the PCUnlocker ISO file to it. When this is completed, close ISO2Disc utility, unplug the USB stick and use it to remove your lost Surface password.

Insert the PCUnlocker USB drive into the full-size USB 3.0 port on your Surface. Press and hold the Volume Down (-) button on the top edge of the device’s screen, then press the Power button. When the Surface logo appears, release Volume Down button and the machine will now boot from the USB drive.

After booted to the PCUnlocker program, you can see all your Windows user accounts. Select a local account from the list and click on “Reset Password” button. The program will remove your forgotten Surface password immediately. If the account you selected is linked to a Microsoft account, PCUnlocker will automatically help you switch the Microsoft account back to local account.

Click on Restart button. While rebooting, unplug the USB drive and let the Surface boot from hard drive normally. When comes to the login screen, just click on your user icon and you can log on to your Surface Book or Surface Pro without typing a password! That’s it!

Reset Forgotten Windows 10 Password without Reset Disk

What to do if you forgot Windows 10 password and don’t have a password reset disk? This happens even for the most savvy computer users. In this tutorial we’ll show you a simple way to reset forgotten Windows 10 password for free. This method works by adding a local admin account so you can recover access to your files, no matter you’ve forgotten the password of a local account or a Microsoft account.

How to Reset Forgotten Windows 10 Password without Reset Disk?

Boot your problematic Windows 10 computer from a Windows 10 Installation DVD. When you see the message “Press any key to boot from CD or DVD” on the screen, just press any key to let the computer boot from CD instead of hard drive.

boot-from-cd

Windows 10 Setup will greet you and prompt you to configure your language settings. Press Shift + F10 to open a Command Prompt.

windows-10-setup

Replace the file utilman.exe with cmd.exe. Before you do this, you should rename utilman.exe so that you can restore it later after password reset.

ren d:\windows\system32\utilman.exe utilman.exe.bak
copy d:\windows\system32\cmd.exe d:\windows\system32\utilman.exe

replace-utilman

Note: If you get the error message “The system cannot find the specified path“, it’s likely that d:\ is not the drive letter of the partition where Windows 10 is installed.

Close the Command Prompt and quit the Windows 10 Setup. Next click Yes to confirm that you want to cancel the Windows 10 installation.

cancel-windows-10-setup

Restart your computer and remove the DVD. When you get to the Windows 10 sign-in screen, click the Ease of Access icon in the lower-right corner.

You should see a Command Prompt where you can enter the following commands to add a local administrator account. Replace test with the account name of your choice.

net user test /add net localgroup administrators test /add

add-local-admin-account

Close the Command Prompt and reboot the computer. When you come back to Windows 10 sign-in screen again, your new account should show up and you can login without a password.

windows-10-logon

Once logging in, you have full access to all files on your computer and reset the password of any user account from the Control Panel. It’s that simple!

How to Reset Lost Windows 7 Password with Hiren’s Boot CD

Hi there, so you forgot the administrator password on your Windows 7 computer, and now you are wondering how to reset it? You are in the right place. Here I will demonstrate you to reset lost Windows 7 password offline by running chntpw tool from Hiren’s Boot CD.

How to Reset Lost Windows 7 Password with Hiren’s Boot CD?

Go to the website hirensbootcd.org and click the Download link. Scroll down the page and download the compressed file Hirens.BootCD.15.2.zip. The file extracts into a folder and within that folder you will find the bootable .iso image file: Hiren’s.BootCD.15.2.iso.
Burn the ISO image to your CD using your favourite burner (or put it to a USB flash drive with the freeware ISO2Disc). Power on your computer and make the CD-ROM to boot first.
Once the computer has started from the CD, you will get to Hiren Boot CD startup page with many utilities. Select Offline NT/2000/XP/Vista/7 Password Changer and hit Enter.
Next you’ll see the Linux kernel boot options. Just press Enter.
On the following screen you need to select the partition where Windows 7 is located. In my screenshot you can see that there is only one partition, so I type in the number 1 and press Enter. Your situation may be different if you have multiple partitions or hard disk drives.
Now it needs to know the exact location of the Windows registry. Except in the rarest of occasions, the default location will be the correct one. Just press Enter to accept the default Windows Registry path.
The next screen will ask which part of the registry it should load. Choose the default choice “[1] – Password reset [sam system security]” and press Enter.
Now the chntpw utility needs to know exactly what you want to do. Choose the default choice “[1] – Edit user data and passwords” and press Enter.
This screen shows that three users were discovered: Administrator, Guest and Tom. The account that I am trying to clear the password on is the Tom account. Notice at the bottom of the screen that I have typed in Tom and now I just need to press Enter.
Type 1 for “Clear (blank) user password” and then press Enter.
Type ! to quit editing user and then press Enter.
Type q and press Enter to quit the chntpw tool.
This screen shows that we have reached the final step: writing the password changes to disk. Enter y for yes and press Enter.
Remove the Hiren’s Boot CD and press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to reboot your computer. After rebooting you will be able to log in to Windows 7 without entering a password. If you are the only user on your computer, Windows 7 will boot all the way to the desktop and will skip the logon screen altogether.

How to Bypass Windows 7 Password with Trinity Rescue Kit

So you forgot your Windows 7 password… uh oh. Don’t worry, it happens and you aren’t out of luck. Here we’ll show you how to bypass Windows 7 password with a free Linux live CD – Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK).

The password resetting tool in Trinity Rescue Kit, called winpass, is actually just an automated script for the chntpw (Offline NT Password & Registry Editor) tool, which allows you to reset the passwords of any local account in Windows 8, 7, Vista and XP.

How to Bypass Windows 7 Password with Trinity Rescue Kit?

After you download the ISO image of Trinity Rescue Kit, you have to burn it on a DVD by right-clicking the ISO file. If you have an older Windows version that doesn’t support ISO burning, you can use the freeware ImgBurn. If you don’t have an optical drive and you want to boot from a USB drive, you can use the free tool ISO2Disc.
Insert the CD into the optical drive and restart your computer. It should boot from the CD instead of the hard drive. If not, you’ll need to change the boot order in your PC’s BIOS settings to boot from the optical drive first.
After you boot Trinity Rescue Kit, you should see the following screen. Scroll down to the “Windows password resetting” option, then hit Enter.
Next select the “Winpass prompts for username first” option. TRK will ask you the username for the account for which you want to reset the password. Keep in mind that is case sensitive.
The system will then search for and list all Windows installations on your computer. If there is only one Windows installation, press 1 and hit Enter.
After that you will have the choices to set a new password or simply clear the password. I strongly suggest to clear the password, not set new user password. So type 1 and press Enter.
You will see a “password cleared” message, meaning that you have successfully bypassed Windows 7 user password.
Now restart the computer by going back to the main menu and choosing the restart option. Now you can log on to your computer without Windows prompting you for a password.

How to Recover Windows 8 PIN and Picture Password in Seconds

Both PIN and picture password are new and innovative ways to log in to your Windows 8 computer. But compared to a traditional text-based password, these two sign-in options are much less secure and they can be cracked easily!

With the small utility Mimikatz you can quickly grab plain-text passwords from Windows 8 or 8.1 system, no matter how strong your passwords are! Any local user with Admin privileges can decrypt the text passwords of all users whose accounts were set to a PIN or picture password.

How to Recover Windows 8 PIN and Picture Password in Seconds?

Go to http://blog.gentilkiwi.com/mimikatz and download the latest mimikatz binary. Extract the contents, access the either the Win32 or x64 folder (depends which OS you have installed, 32 or 64 bit) and run mimikatz.exe as administrator.
A Command prompt will appear. We’ll need to enable debug mode with the privilege::debug command.
Next run the token::elevate command which will force mimikatz to elevate to SYSTEM.
Run the vault::list command and it will dump plain-text credentials. As you can see it pulled the 4-digit PIN code, picture password as well as my local account password. If you used a Microsoft account as your computer’s login, this tool can also dump your email account password.

Conclusion

This is a security hole in Windows 8/8.1 that makes it easy for someone to steal the plain-text passwords from memory. Remember that never switch to PIN or picture sign-in options as this will expose your local/Microsoft account password.

How to Create A Windows-To-Go USB Drive with ISO2Disc

Windows To Go is a new feature from Windows 8 that allows to install Windows 8 to a portable USB drive. It works much like a WinPE or Linux Live CD but it’s definitely not an ordinary bootdisk. It is to place a complete, fully manageable Windows 8 installation on a USB drive.

Although the built-in Windows To Go creation tool is only available in Windows 8 Enterprise, there are third-party softwares out there to set up a Windows To Go USB drive on any Windows PC. Here we’ll explain how to make a Windows To Go USB drive with the freeware ISO2Disc.

Requirements:

A USB 3.0 flash drive with at least 32GB of storage, or an external USB hard drive.
Windows 8 or 8.1 ISO image
ISO2Disc

How to Create A Windows-To-Go USB Drive with ISO2Disc?

Plug in the USB flash drive you want to use for Windows To Go.
Download and install the ISO2Disc application.
Launch the ISO2Disc program. Click on Browse to select your Windows 8 or 8.1 ISO image, or simply drag the ISO file to the program.
Click on Burn to USB Flash Drive and then select one of your attached USB drives. Make sure you’ve backed up all important data on your USB drive as the drive needs to erased completely.
If you want to create a Windows To Go USB drive to boot off a UEFI-based machine, make sure you use a 64-bit ISO image of Windows 8/8.1 and choose GPT partition style. Otherwise choose the default option: MBR.
Under the Bootdisk type, select “Windows To Go (install Windows to USB)” from the list.
Click on Start Burn to begin installing Windows, which could take up to 30 minutes or longer depending on the speed of your USB drive.
Once the job is done, you’ll see the “Burn finished” message. You can now restart your computer to test your newly prepared Windows To Go USB drive. If your PC won’t boot from your USB drive then you’ll need to enter into the BIOS and change the boot order so that your USB drive is first on the list.

The first time you boot from a Windows To Go USB drive, you’ll have to go through the same first-time setup process you’d see after installing Windows on a computer normally. Once setup, you’ll be able to boot much more quickly in future.

Backup Saved Passwords in Nearly Any Browser

Many Web browsers include a built-in password manager that can save your passwords so you don’t need to type them next time you visit a website. But the only problem is that most of browsers don’t have an option to export or backup stored passwords.

Password Recovery Bundle is a handy toolkit that can extract the list of saved passwords from nearly any browser, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Chrome Canary, Chromium, SeaMonkey, Flock and Avant Browser. Here’s how to use it:

Download Password Recovery Bundle (about 36.2Mb) and save it to your desktop. Double-click the setup file and follow the on-screen instructions to install it on your computer.
Launch the Password Recovery Bundle program and click on Start Recovery button.
This program will display a long list of supported passwords and select the recovery option for your We browser. In this example, I choose the Chrome Password option as I want to backup saved passwords in Chrome.
It will quickly decrypt and show you the saved passwords, along with user names and URLs of the websites. You can then select more than one password, copy them to the clipboard and save them to a text file for safe keeping.

This utility is really useful when you have saved passwords in your browser but need to format your hard drive or do a clean reinstall.