First Option

How to I remove and/or reset an administrator password from a standard/local account?

1. Hold Left Shift and press Restart button.
   
2. Let it do it’s stuff.

3. You will be on a windows recovery environment which is a blue screen with options.

4. Press troubleshoot, then advanced options, then finally command prompt.

5. When the command prompt opens, navigate to your root disk which is most likely C: but pls check with dir command.

6. Also type (diskletter): like this C: instead of cd C:

7. then type in these commands and it will work

cd windows

cd system32

copy utilman.exe utilmanbackup.exe

copy cmd.exe utilman.exe

7. Then it will ask to overwrite, select yes because this is not going to do anything harmful. I’ll later explain.

Then return to windows login screen, there will look like there was no difference, but don’t login yet instead press the accessibility button (that button with a human) if you did the steps correct, then a command prompt will pop up.

This command prompt has admin access without needing a password.

Then go ahead and type in the Windows Command Prompt

net user administrator NewPassword

Replace NewPassword with desired password.

Now I’ll explain. The accessibility button has assets and those assets are stored in a file called utilman.exe without utilman.exe the accessibility button will not work, but you can always replace the utilman.exe with something else. Like cmd.exe which will open command prompt so when you click the button, the button thinks the cmd.exe is utilman.exe so it will forcefully open cmd.exe which will then pop up as ‘admin’ because it did not have any other choices. So there you go. A nice and simple way to get your password back.

P.S. You don’t have to read all of this. This is nothing crucial, just some explaining. 🙂

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Second Option

I suggest you create a Windows 10 disk for another computer and try to recover your system:

Download the tool according to the Windows 10 architecture installed here:
https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=691209;

Run the downloaded setup and click Create installation media for another computer;
Select the Language, then select the edition and architecture according to the installed Windows 10;
Connect the Pen Drive;
Click Next;
Select the USB Flash Drive option and click Next.
Click Finish.
Boot with the Pen Drive;
When the installation window appears, click Repair your computer.
Click on Troubleshooting> Advanced Options> Command Prompt> enter your Account and enter the commands:
net user administrator /active:yes [Enter]

After that, restart the computer and on the login screen, the administrator that was activated should appear, click to enter it and return the administrator privileges to your user.

Press Windows+R, type netplwiz and click OK;
Select your user and click Properties;
Access the Group Membership tab;
Select Administrator and click Apply.
Log off and enter your user, after that I disabled the default Windows administrator.

Press Windows+X and click Windows PowerShell (Admin);
Enter the command below:
net user administrator /active:no [Enter]

Please check if everything is back to normal now.

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Third Option

Is your system encrypted (using bitlocker for example)?

If not, you used to be able to mount the windows system and replace utilman.exe by cmd.exe, however, I do not know if this still works.

If you want to try, here are the steps:

1. Make a bootable linux USB

2. Launch Linux and try mounting your Windows system (if that fails, try boot into Windows and shut it down the regular way (again)).

3. Go to the Windows/System32 map

4. Execute “mv Utilman.exe Utilman.exe.bak”

5. Execute “cp cmd.exe Utilman.exe”

6. Unmount the Windows system

7. Shutdown Linux and boot into Windows

8. Click on the utility icon (next to the shutdown icon in Windows 10 I believe)

9. A cmd prompt should have started with system rights, within this cmd prompt, execute “net user <YOUR_USERNAME> *”

10. Now it should ask to enter a (new) password for the user.

11. Login and profit

I hope this helps, good luck!

P.S. Don’t forget to revert the changes to utilman.exe. To do that boot into linux again, Mount the Windows system and move to the map “Windows/System32”, then execute “mv Utilman.exe.bak Utilman.exe”.

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Fourth Option

1. Create a bookable hirens usb and run that.
2. or Download KonBoot, it is a boot utility that bypasses the admin password. So you could add a second admin account or simply remove/change the password to make it accessible. It works just fine with XP > Win 11, including linked accounts.