Virtualbox Reset Windows Password
Ademaro Hicken
Important Article Update: An important update to this tutorial has just been added on 2nd November 2018 due to recent changes by Microsoft to Windows Defender that is included with Windows 10. Please see the heading titled "Copying cmd.exe to utilman.exe didn't work for me - Now what?" at the bottom of this article to resolve the problem if you are using Windows Defender as your Antivirus of choice on Windows 10, rather than one of the other multitude of third-party antivirus applications available. Regards, Andrew Leniart
I frequently see questions pop up at Experts Exchange from folks that have forgotten their Windows 10 user password and who didn't bother to create a Win10 Password Reset Disk, don't have a secondary Administrator profile to log in with, or who use a Microsoft Connected Live account, without recovery options to be able to reset their password online.
Links are often suggested to askers, recommending various third-party boot CD's or Images, some free, some paid, that may have worked great for Windows 7 and earlier installations, but can sometimes fail to reliably reset a Windows 10 password. The good news is that you don't need any third party tools. All you need is a Windows 10 Installation DVD or a Windows 10 ISO file which will work every time.
Note: Though not tested at the time of writing, the Utilman related tricks described in this tutorial should also apply to previous versions of Microsoft Windows, including Windows XP / Vista / 8.1 / Windows 7 and Servers.
You're going to have to boot your computer with a Windows 10 Installation DVD or with a USB device that a Windows 10 Installation ISO has been extracted to and made bootable. So restart and enter BIOS settings on your computer. How to do this can differ depending on your mainboard manufacturer or the brand name of your computer, but most commonly, getting into BIOS simply means tapping the Delete key on your keyboard while booting up.
Often there will be a message on your monitor during boot telling you which key you need to press to get into BIOS Settings. If pressing the Delete key doesn't work for you, check which keys you need to press for your particular computer or mainboard with the manufacturer's website, or use the ask a question feature at Experts Exchange to ask for help.
For those of you using a Virtual Machine in VirtualBox, change your boot device to Boot from a saved Windows 10 Installation ISO. On the Oracle VM VirtualBox Machine, click "Devices" > "Optical Drives" > "Choose Disk Image" and select the saved Windows 10 installation ISO. If you don't (or no longer) have one, you can download the ISO file straight from Microsoft using this link.
If you don't already have a second Administrator enabled user account on Windows 10 to help you out, just create one on the fly. Once you've booted with your Windows 10 installation DVD (or ISO in the case of VirtualBox) the process is quite simple and you can then make use of the Windows GUI (Graphical User Interface) to change the password.
2. Press Shift+F10 on your keyboard to open a DOS command prompt window. The Window that pops up will show a drive letter of X:\ That's a temporary drive letter that Windows has assigned to boot media you've used.
3. Enter the following commands exactly as shown to perform actions on your Microsoft Windows installation, which will usually be on drive letter D: - and pressing your Enter Key after each line.
Note: If the following commands fail for you, then type "Dir E:", "Dir F:" etc until you find which drive letter your system drive has been assigned, then just replace D: with the drive letter for your system.
5. Now that Windows has restarted, we can use the fake "utilman.exe" command we copied above, to bring up a command prompt at the login screen by clicking the "Ease of Access" option on the Windows 10 login screen.
You will now have a new Administrator enabled account to log into Windows with, named "Temporary" and with no login password set. We could have set a password at this point if we wanted to, but we'll do that in Windows GUI instead so that we can record a helpful password hint as well.
7. Log into Windows 10 with the new "Temporary" account just created. It's insecure at this point, so the first thing I recommend you do is to give it a good strong password, even if you don't intend to keep it for the long term.
Note: If the account you are trying to change the password to is an Online Microsoft Connected Account, skip down to "What if my Account is a Microsoft Connected Account?" now. Otherwise, continue on to reset a Local User Account.
8. Now that you've logged back into Windows 10 with an Administrator enabled account, you can change the password on your main local account. As with most things in Windows, there's more than one way of doing this, but here's one simple way.
Be sure restore your c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe file or you will no longer be able to configure any of Windows Accessibility options like Magnifier, High Contrast Theme, Narrator and On-Screen Keyboard, the latter which can often be useful before logging onto the system.
There are different ways to achieve this, but I think one of the simplest methods is to use WinPE (Windows Preinstallation Environment) Complete the following steps to restore Windows Accessibility functionality and reverse cmd.exe functionality;
You're Done! Select the previously forgotten password account to login with and use the newly set password to log in. If you haven't done so already, (you should have) then don't forget to give the "Temporary" user profile a strong password if you intend to keep it.
Resetting a Microsoft Connected account is easy, providing you set up your account recovery options, such as security questions, a mobile telephone number where you can get an SMS, and a recovery email address. If you did, good job!
A) First things first, if you haven't done so already, complete Steps 1 through 7 under the "Create a Secondary (Local) Administrator User" heading above, then skip back to here once you have created a "Temporary" local administrator user account.
B) If you've followed all instructions correctly, you should now be in Windows 10 using the "Temporary" user account we created, and have set a password on that account. If not, go back to Step 1 above and find out which step you may have skipped.
Microsoft recently updated the definitions for Windows Defender, which is a respectable free antivirus app included in all editions of Windows 10, to recognize that the utilman.exe command we created earlier in this tutorial is fake.
This can cause issues with this process when trying the above-described processes when Windows Defender is enabled on your system and is being used as your Antivirus App, rather than another third party Antivirus application: when you click on the "Ease of Access" button, nothing happens, since Windows Defender blocks the access to the fake utilman.exe file. Here's a screenshot of what Windows Defender will show in its threat history after we try to use the fake utilman.exe which it blocks:
Credits: Thanks to Experts Exchange Expert and Page Editor "McKnife" for providing most of the screenshots used below to save me making my own, and also for bringing this recent development to my attention!
To get around this problem, simply restart Windows 10 into safe mode. In safe mode, defender will start a little later and allow us for a few seconds to still use our method as usual. On test machines, I had 30 seconds - on fast machines, it could be less.
1) To start in safe mode, we need to restart our computer in a special way: you need to keep the shift key pressed, while clicking on the restart button. After it restarts, you will then see the following screen. Click on the "Troubleshoot" panel as shown below.
Note: If your installation doesn't show the above screenshot as it turned out for me, it will likely look like the following, in which case you just click the "Startup Settings" button as shown below.
8) Having done that, the fake "utilman.exe" we copied and created earlier in this tutorial will now work for a few seconds until defender starts - this will usually be just long enough to bring up a command prompt at the login screen by clicking the "Ease of Access" option on the Windows 10 login screen and use the two commands you find in the steps already given under the "Create a Secondary (Local) Administrator User" heading earlier in this tutorial. Done!
Everything in this tutorial was tested and working at the time of writing with a Windows 10 Professional installation and a Microsoft Connected user account. Each step was documented as I went through the process myself, so I can say with total confidence that it works well.
Finally, this entire process was focused on getting you back into your Microsoft Connected profile account in Windows 10 in a scenario where you can't reset your Microsoft account password online for some reason. How to now go about recovering your Microsoft account is another story. Despite some fake promises you may find on the web, only Microsoft Support will be able to help you in this regard.
If you're using PowerShell, make sure that you have the latest PowerShell module installed and configured and are signed in to your Azure subscription. You can also perform these steps for VMs created with the classic deployment model.
If you enter a different name than the current local administrator account on your VM, the VMAccess extension will add a local administrator account with that name, and assign your specified password to that account. If the local administrator account on your VM exists, the VMAccess extension will reset the password. If the account is disabled, the VMAccess extension will enable it.
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