Can the only administrator account password be reset on Windows 8?

Question

I have setup a machine for a relative that have children, I made myself an account on the computer which is the only administrator account.

I have forgotten the password that I had setup the administrator account on the machine. I did not create a recovery disk on setup nor did I associate any MS account with my user account.

Is there any way to reset the password on this account? Or make another administrator account?

Answer 1

The only way I have found that works is to use a live cd ( I used ubuntu ) and physical access to the computer

Boot into the computer with a live cd or dvd find Windows System 32 directory, renamed utilman.exe to utilman.old copy cmd.com to utilman.exe Reboot the computer into Windows At the Windows log in prompt I hit the “Windows”+”U” key and open pops a system level command prompt. From here you can type any windows command

At the command prompt type

Net user John 123 /add

This will add user named John with a password 123

Then type

net localgroup administrators "John" /add

This will give you admin privilege

Then reboot and try the new administrator account you could also change the old password that you forgot now

Answer 2

I've found the solution to the problem following a page on About.com

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows-8/a/reset-password-windows-8.htm

This is similar to user221429's suggestion however I think its more precise.

Using a recovery disk, I as able to boot into the command prompt, there I moved utilman.exe and replaced it with cmd.exe.

Rather than creating a new user though, I simply typed in...

net user [username] [password]

This command is able to reset the password of any given account. You can also list all accounts by using net user