Well it's a MS password not a local password......so most of the options I've tried have failed, anyone got a another idea?
It is a Lenovo Thinkcenter with Win 8, I remember now why I build my own PCs...what a piece-o-shit...lol
Those passwords are tied to their cloud accounts. Recover the account by having them reset their password (Via the usual e-mail loop) on another computer.
Of course if they can't do this since they don't know their password in the first place then their account is gone if they didn't have a recovery email/phone number tied to that account.
Just create a new local user account. Not sure how to do that actually. And tell them 1) only create local accounts 2) use lastpass
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Conboot or konboot not sure which, will straight bypass the password and log you in.
http://www.kon-boot.com/
Work on online auth accounts too.
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Thank you, I'll give it a shot.
Not to be cheap......but it's $15 bucks, I'm kinda' doing this as a favor so unless they want to spring for the software which they won't because they asked in passing for me to look if I got in to see if there were any documents or pictures on it and save them if I could, I used a Linux live CD to boot it after figuring out how to get it to boot from the CD-Rom (thank you Google) and grabbed the stuff they wanted which wasn't much since it was bought new on 6/15 so it hadn't seem much usage.
Anyway I think I'll just do a restore and give it back to them, all they really want is a usable computer and to retrieve any personal data which I did do that for them, the password seems to be a wasted effort at this point but it was a fun exercise in reminding me just how much junk people buy, it's really sad what companies like Lenovo turn out and call it a PC.
So they opted for just doing a factory restore so they can use the computer, which I'll do tonight.
I want to thank everyone for their posts and help, I've never used a Windows version above Win 7 and since I've moved to Linux for my daily driver months ago I'm starting to forget a lot of the tricks I learned over the years dealing with Windows weirdness in favor of a little more Linux knowledge.
Anyway thanks again for all the help and suggestions it is much appreciated.
You can activate the local administrator account using the command prompt from a windows 8 boot disc and log in to that.
Also, just to make you aware, you can do a "system refresh" by holding shift and clicking shut down then going to system repair.
Then when you log in you could go to control panel, create a local user account, and they can use that, then disable the local admin account again.
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