How to Reset Windows 10 password

One way to reset password is to reset Windows. Here’s instruction from microsoft support.
Forgot your Windows 10 user password. Here’s a way to fix it if your BIOS is not password protected or if you know the BIOS Password.

Here are the steps to reset password,
First thing to do is to boot using Windows Installation Media (USB boot works),
Then we select “Repair your computer” that gives us access to Troubleshooting. Then we choose command prompt.

After getting access to the command prompt I found that C drive is the Win System Drive. In some cases this can be different. Setup might mark D as system drive. Once you know the system drive it’s pretty easy and we can go to next step.

We rename Utilman binary,

move C:\Windows\System32\Utilman.exe C:\Windows\System32\Utilman.exe.bak

Then we rename cmd.exe,

move C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe C:\Windows\System32\Utilman.exe

I can verify it,

X:\Sources> dir C:\Windows\System32\Utilman.*
 Volume in drive C is OS
 Volume Serial Number is 3A78-E6F7

 Directory of C:\Windows\System32

03/18/2017  12:57 PM           271,872 Utilman.exe
03/18/2017  12:57 PM            90,112 Utilman.exe.bak
               2 File(s)        361,984 bytes
               0 Dir(s)  462,441,738,240 bytes free

Then we exit command prompt and select “Turn off pc” from the menu. Then we unplug the installation media from the system.

When Windows boots up normally without the installation media, on the logging screen, we click “Ease of access” which brings us “Command Prompt”. That’s golden gate bridge to resetting password.

We add a user using following command syntax,

net user user_name password

Please user_name and password in command above with intended credentials.

Once you are done click Shutdown computer. Now plug in USB boot or DVD installation media again and boot to Windows 10 Setup. Get access to command prompt as mentioned before. Afterwards, restore utilman and cmd.exe as it was before,

move C:\Windows\System32\Utilman.exe C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe
move C:\Windows\System32\Utilman.exe.bak C:\Windows\System32\Utilman.exe

If you don’t want to type in the commands above, you can copy commands in a script and put inside the USB disk to run them or open using notepad command and copy-paste.

Reference

• Reset a Windows 10 password