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Reset Windows 11 password when you're locked out

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After updating the Windows 11 OS, my sister's laptop was locked out and the existing pin and password were not working at all. We tried several things, but nothing seemed to work. In fact, we even changed the Microsoft account's password from a different device, but it still wasn't able to log in (even though the Wi-Fi was on).

But we finally got a working solution from this video (method 2), but I had to improvise at the end a bit:

  1. Boot your laptop in the Recovery Mode, I had to keep pressing F11 repeatedly after pressing the power button
  2. Click on the Troubleshoot > Advanced options > Command Prompt option which will open a new CMD window
  3. Run the following commands one-by-one in the command prompt window:
    C:

cd Windows/System32

ren utilman.exe utilman1.exe

ren cmd.exe utilman.exe

exit
  4. Then click on Continue and start the Windows 11
  5. When laptop restarts and login screen appears, click on the Accessibility button in the bottom-right area
  6. It opens the command prompt window, where you have to run the following command:
    control userpasswords2
  7. The above command opens the User Accounts window
  8. User's name should be visible, click on it, select Reset Password below and change the password
  9. Now, close everything and restart, and you should be able to log in with the new password

Most of the steps are shown in the video in the method 2 section, but I had to do it a bit differently at the end (only #8 in the above steps is different from the video).

After that I copied all my data to an external drive and reset the PC from Settings using the 'Cloud install' option. The local and cloud reinstall options in recovery mode had failed earlier – the reinstall only worked after I signed in.

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