How to Bypass Windows 10 Password on a PC

My Windows 10 PC says the password is expired and get ‘denied access’ error when inputting the old password. It is a DIY PC. How to get around this bug? I heard the password can be reset or bypassed without losing data?

Thanks in advance

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and we know its your pc how? lol

your first post is help IM LOCKED OUT OF THIS PC! help me hack into it…
YEAH!?..

NO!.

:smiley:

Have nice Day!.

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Technically you don’t need the password to access the account data; simply remove the storage drive (SSD or HDD) and plug it into a different PC.

Once you backup all your data, you can reinstall Windows 10 by creating a bootable USB.

Regarding bypassing the password screen, that’s a more difficult task, especially with Windows 10, as the password encryption has changed compared to older versions. There’s a few guides online of how to do it, but it differs on which version of Windows 10 you have (as the password algorithm changed).

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Everything depends on how the system was setup.
If the system is running Bitlocker enable there nothing to do.
If the Bios is lock and resetting Cmos doesn’t reset the Bios password, there nothing do .

But yes , don’t steal and give back the hardware.
If it’s second hand hardware try contacting the seller for support if they cannot help you.
Congratulation there great chance you just purchase stolen hardware…

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@TheAlmightyBaconLord , I am not tech savy so this is a big challenging for me. I prefer fixing this more softly. And I have a few important documents sitting on my desktop.

BTW, if the device was not legally owned by me, I won’t ask here as a system reinstallation is fair enough.

Anyway, thx for the input.

@Lithely , the drive/partition is not encrypted by BitLocker. I am sure about that. And no bios password during startup.

Spray it with water. Windows will interpret this as a threat and unlock.

please don’t

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chntpw is the way.

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Not 100% on if this is still a thing in latest Windows 10, but at least in 7 and early 10, you can boot from a Windows Install stick and enable the integrated default administrator account, that’s always there, but gets locked on installation.
That’s pretty much the way we did it for customers who forgot their passwords.

I’d have to look up the specifics on if this still works, but might be worth a shot. It requires a bootable windows install and at least a bit of cmd usage. So, not sure if you feel you can do that.

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Similar to what @domsch1988 said; boot using recovery disk, replace Utilman.exe with cmd.exe, boot back up and use the accessibility menu on the logon screen for an elevated cmd prompt where you can reset passwords.

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I was going to say the same thing. Knoppix → chntpw and blank out your password for your account and unlock the account.

If that is considered breaking computing laws in your country, then tread softly.

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i am able to boot chntpw from Knoppix bootable USB drive. Followed the prompt to reset the password. But when I booted the PC, the password is still there.

BTW, the computer has the latest updates. Not sure if the above tricks were fixed by recent update or not.

did you same the changes to the SAM with chntpw? if not, it is not going to work. chntpw loads the SAM in memory and operates on it there. When you are satisfies with your changes, you need to save them. If there is an issue with the SAM, it will yell at you, telling you that it could not save or change something and so on.

You could also give Cain and Abel a try. It’s a password recovery utility that is used by both white and black hat hackers in cyber security. Here’s a link on how it works. I’ve only used it in an educational setting but I KNOW it works in the wild. There’s plenty of documentation on how to use the program to recover admin passwords. All this assumes you are authorized to do this on that machine.

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If the drive is un-encrypted, boot off a usb stick with Ubuntu. Then access the disk from there and copy what you need.

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Microsoft says that might be a corrupted profile

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-security/password-expired-changed-denied-on-lockscreen/b456921e-4ee6-418d-99d2-e2219fee7d3f

There are some solid password reset methods here, but if those don’t work. Then you will have pull any data you want off and then reset the OS. I believe someone has posted that you can just boot into Linux and mount the drive to recover the data.

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Do you have any other accounts on your Windows 10 computer? As you can even login to computer with another account then change login password of the locked account.

I have a windows to go install on an external SSD for this reason… if you don’t have a second account you can try on it and if the disk is not encrypted, it is as simple as booting to either Windows to go or Windows PE then use robocopy to yank the user’s folder from the root drive’s “Users” folder.

I would highly recommend storing or at least backing up data to a location separate from your OS drive in the future…

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@Smaillee only one admin account on this computer. the other is a guest account.

@Razor_Blade I will following your suggestion once I am able to unlock this computer.

Well…You can even change the login password of locked account with the guest account.
All you have to do is log in to Windows 10 computer as guest,and open the control panel, click on ‘Account’,then change the password for the locked account on Windows 10 computer.
If you want to reset or bypass Windows 10 password directly, try Ophcrack and PassGeeker for Windows.
These are two of my favorite tools right now.

If you can demonstrate that working I’ll PayPal you $50usd

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