Use TRK To Reset Or Recover Windows 7 Account Password

I have just tested the latest Trinity Rescue Kit 3.3 build 334 and confirm this freeware stills able to recover or reset Windows 7 administrator account password. It works just nice as expected on my Dell Latitude with vanilla Windows 7 Ultimate installation.

In case you forget the Windows admin account password and find no other way to recover it (i.e. no password reset disk, no clue from the password hint, etc), the TRK freeware might able to take you out of this nightmare: 1) Download TRK ISO file and verify its MD5 checksum against the published file checksum value before burning the CD image to CD/DVD-ROM.

For Netbook without optical drive, you have to boot the TRK CD/DVD-ROM from another computer with CD/DVD-ROM drive and refer to the guide of create a bootable TRK USB flash drive.

2) Update the computer boot drive priority in BIOS setup to make sure it boots up from USB flash drive or CD/DVD-ROM drive, whichever applicable.

Some BIOS might have a hotkey which if pressed during start-up could allow user to choose a different boot drive as needed. For example, Dell Latitude uses F12, latest AMI BIOS uses F8, etc.

3) Boots the computer up from Trinity Rescue Kit media. At the (Linux) command prompt, type the following command and press ENTER:

winpass -u Administrator

CAUTION

• TRK is actually a customized Linux distribution. Thus the command is case-sensitive, i.e. “a” is not equal to “A”
• The Windows 7 real, built-in administrator account is not enabled by default and thus you have to enable this built-in administrator account with TRK first. Otherwise, replace Administrator account name with the user-defined administrator account. If this is called Walker, make sure you replace “Administrator” with “Walker” and not “walker”.

4) At the “user edit menu” prompt, type 1 and press ENTER key to effectively reset the said Windows account password to blank (empty) password! Having said that, you will able to log in with this account again to Windows 7, even if you have forgotten the password.