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ATI 2012 recovery

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I suddenly had a problem with my password for my Windows 10 PC suddenly stopped working. MS tech said to boot using media tool and pull admin with net use command. But no directories were visible in the C drive, so I did a recovery from my incremental backup.

I selected drive 1 with all sub-selections ticked as the target. It is an SSD.The recovery ran successfully. 

My Windows password still didn't work on restart so I went back to the media tool's command prompt. The C drive has a Boot and a Recovery directory but none of the Windows directories and files that I would expect. There is an X drive. though, with familiar directories such as Program Files but none of my installed programs are in it.

Can someone advise me as to what is happening? 

 

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X: drive is a WinPE recovery environment.  That is the temporary drive loaded into memory for the recovery session.  You can modify it all day, but the next time you boot to the recovery, it will be exactly the same as this is meant to be a temporary bootable recovery environment.  This has nothing to do with the original disk itself.

If you dont' have a working password in Windows, you may be out of luck.  In the past, you could change it by using a Linux boot disk which would give you access to change local Windows passwords (or blank them).  I don't know if this still works for Windows 10 or not - haven't tried.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tr-dojo/reset-windows-passwords-with-t…

Unfortunately, if you're using a Windows Live account for login, I've heard of others in the same boat because it wants you to use your livemail, but blocks you from using it until it can verify you - problem is you can't log in to verify the account!  If you had a local account password at some point, you can try using the old local logon and old local password, or the new livemail account and the old logon password (intead of the livemail password) in hopes that one of those will work.  Other than that, I don't know of anything else that would allow you to get past an account that has a password on it - if it were that easy, then you wouldn't need a password.

What did they mean by "pull the admin with net use".  Do they mean to look up the accounts on the C: drive?  You should be able to navigate to C:\ from your recovery environment and possibly look through the user accounts, but I don't know exaclty what the reference from Microsfot was specifically getting at. 

To pull the admin I was given this. 

Go to c/windows/system32 and send this:

Net user administrator /active:yes

On reboot the PC will have an Administrator account without a password. 

However, I can't find the place where my backed up C drive was recovered to. It's not in the C drive but the PC does boot up and asks for the Windows password. 

Roger Chung-Wee wrote:

To pull the admin I was given this. 

Go to c/windows/system32 and send this:

Net user administrator /active:yes

On reboot the PC will have an Administrator account without a password. 

However, I can't find the place where my backed up C drive was recovered to. It's not in the C drive but the PC does boot up and asks for the Windows password. 

Roger, what type of recovery did you do here?  If your computer is booting correctly to the Windows login prompt, then how are you attempting to perform the command(s) you were told to use, if you cannot login?

My understanding of what you would need to do here would be to get into the Windows recovery options, i.e. where you are shown the options to do a Startup Recovery, open a Command prompt etc.

You would need to open a Command prompt then in that window, change to C:\Windows\System32 first, then issue the Net user administrator /active:yes command to activate the hidden Administrator account so that it would show when you next restart the computer.

The alternative to doing the above is to use a tool such as Lazesoft Recover My Password which will allow you to reset your passwords - this works fine for local Windows accounts but I have never tried this for a Microsoft Account (I refuse to use this type of account on my computers).

When you boot from the Windows media tool, you can go into Repair, Troubleshooting and Command prompt (from where commands are issued).

The problem I had was that the C drive was almost empty when I entered the dir command.

However, I took your advice and used Lazesoft to erase my Windows password. Wish I'd known about this sooner. And I don't think that I need a Windows password as my data is stored on a physically different D drive which I've encrypted by using BitLocker. Also, there is nobody else at home to mess around with my PC.

Roger, glad to hear that the advice has helped.