How To Reset The Administrator Password Using The Command Prompt

Hi Readers! This blog will help you to reset the local Administrator password from your Windows machine without any third-party software or Windows password recovery tool.

Here I am just creating one scenario by using the Hyper-V to create one virtual machine with Windows server 2012 R2 and have set a password for the local administrator And just consider I have forgot my password and I could not login using my administrator credentials

There are lots of password recovery tools available in the market and some tool could work correctly but some tool would not.

So, we no need to download or purchase the password recovery tool to reset the user password, by default Microsoft has been given the password reset option in the windows OS itself, just we need to use the repair option from your operating system installer.

I will show you how to do that and we just require the .iso format OS file. You can download the iso file at Microsoft

On below image, you can see that I have mentioned that Boot from the CD and I have mapped the .iso file

Now I am just booting my machine and installing the new Operating system

Just click the next button on the OS installer



Below you can see the option to Repair your computer, just click it and it will take you to the new window called options



In this just click the Troubleshoot option to see the Advanced option and click the command prompt option which is highlighted below



And execute the below steps on the Command prompt, here we are just locating the Utilman.exe file from the system32 folder

• Rename the Utilman.exe to Utilman.exe.old by using the “ren” command. Ren is nothing but rename
• Then copy the Utilman.exe to the command prompt to execute the password reset command

Then close the command prompt and click continue option to reboot the machine



So far we have copied the utiman.exe file to the command prompt and rebooted the system, keep in mind we haven’t changed the existing operating system and should not switch off the machine at any cost, if the machine is physically switched off, you need to follow the same step which was mentioned above

Once the machine has successfully rebooted it will take you to the authentication windows, here just click Window + U to open the command prompt and Just type net user, this command will help you to identify who are all having the profile on this system

On below you can see, I have Administrator, Guest and krbtgt profiles And type net user Administrator ************ ( here Welcome@123 is my new password)



Then you will receive a message “The command has completed successfully”. Then close the command prompt and type the new password to the administrator login. Now it will allow you to login to the system

What is Utiman.exe?

The expansion of Utilman is a utility manager, this will help you to operate some required functionality on the login window like magnifier, narrator, on screen keyboard etc.,

Conclusion

We just enabled the command prompt at the login window to reset the administrator password, you can do the same  in the user's desktop by opening cmd prompt.