Have you ever been locked out of a Windows system by either a forgotten password or maybe someone left the company and wasn’t kind enough to put the password on a sticky note on their monitor or under their keyboard?
Well, I have a method for you that will help! Following these steps has saved my clients and me more than once. All kinds of situations have come up, especially when someone leaves a company on bad terms and thinks they will get one over on the team by locking their work behind a crazy password. Not too long ago, a local company called after the owner forgot his password after being on vacation for two weeks. I saved the day by having backups of their Bitlocker Keys and using this trick to reset the password.
For this, you will need a bootable Linux system. I recommend Puppy Linux as it is tiny, and you can put it on a flash drive and keep it with you easily. It is also a Linux distro that will work out of the box to read and write to NTFS, where I have had issues with others.
If you need help getting a bootable Linux drive setup, check out my article about that: Setting Up Bootable Linux USB.
Resetting Windows Passwords Using Linux
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image.png?resize=505%2C461&ssl=1)
- Plug the USB drive into a USB port on your computer.
- Restart or turn on your computer.
- Press the key to enter the BIOS or UEFI firmware settings; this key can vary depending on the computer and BIOS/UEFI firmware; common keys include F1, F2, F10, Delete, Esc, etc.
- Locate the boot options menu and select the option to boot from USB. The key to enter this option varies by the BIOS/UEFI firmware and computer.
- Save your changes and exit the BIOS/UEFI settings.
- Your computer should now boot from the USB drive.
- Puppy system can take several minutes to boot and have text that looks like this:
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-1.png?resize=754%2C191&ssl=1)
- The booted system will look like this, and you will see several drives listed in the bottom left of the screen:
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-2.png?resize=1024%2C577&ssl=1)
- Click the drives till you find the one that shows Windows System Files it will look like this:
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-3.png?resize=692%2C249&ssl=1)
- Open Windows > System32 Folders, and you will get a list of system programs:
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-4.png?resize=1024%2C538&ssl=1)
- Scroll down and find the file named Utilman.exe:
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-5.png?resize=240%2C96&ssl=1)
- Right click the file and select Rename in the File Options:
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-6.png?resize=514%2C504&ssl=1)
- Change the name to Utilman.exe.bak
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-7.png?resize=227%2C38&ssl=1)
- Now scroll up and find cmd.exe, and this time we will duplicate the file renaming it in the process:
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-8.png?resize=169%2C89&ssl=1)
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-9.png?resize=499%2C512&ssl=1)
- Rename the duplicate file to Utilman.exe:
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-10.png?resize=320%2C282&ssl=1)
- Shutdown puppy by selecting the menu and power option, then shut down don’t worry about saving anything (unless you make customizations)
- Reboot.
- On system login, you will see the ease of access icon in the lower right-hand corner of the screen:
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-11.png?resize=1024%2C515&ssl=1)
- A command window will open, and you can type the command to change the password for a user. The command is: user <username> <Password>
As you can see in the picture, the username is “user,” and the password is “TEST”
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-12.png?resize=975%2C264&ssl=1)
- Login using the new password you just set:
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-13.png?resize=443%2C238&ssl=1)
- To clean up the file changes, the easiest way is to run an administrative command prompt and run the command:
SFC /scannow
Each time the command runs, it will clean the system files, replacing the ones we changed. Run it until it tells you no integrity violations were found.
![](https://i0.wp.com/techsico.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/image-14.png?resize=979%2C513&ssl=1)
This “trick” is great in a pinch and I hope it helps you as it has helped me so many times.