how to fix a wrong password

my sister got scammed the other day and she let someone on her pc online and they went all through her pc and then set a password they used 654321 and they allowed you to try to reset it but then it asked for a reset key/ thumbstick to reset that password. so i had to use my esd drive and just reset her hard drive. she did lose all her data and pictures, she did not have any backup so her loss. so is there a way to get around this? or is it what it is and your stuck if someone gets on your pc online and messes with it? or might you be able to make a master password and place that on a thumb stick for just such cases? and for safety she called the banks to get her passwords changed. she did not have any medical or retirement item on it. thanks

Very sorry to hear what happened to your sister.

Unfortunately, if someone has been granted access to the system and they were able to change the password, you are a bit limited in what can be done.

One possibility that I could think of, however: If you have another account on the same computer with Admin level rights, you could logon to that account and set file permissions on all files owned by the user whose account was compromised and take ownership of all those files.

That's just one of the reasons why it's always a good idea to make sure that there is another Admin account available on the computer.

Second, I'm just going to reiterate what I preach repeatedly - ALWAYS make sure that you have a well thought out and tested backup / recovery plan in place. I know that you are aware of this since you mention that no backups exist, but you might want to stress this to your sister going forward.

i know about good backups but apparently she did not. i did not know you could set up to admins on the same pc. i tried switching accounts on hers but she did not have any. i was thinking of making me the admin and her a used and take away her rights to change the allow online users. and i may still do that. i will for sure if she comes back with the same issue again.

i was kind of hoping it was possible to have a sigh in stick. i see when you set up windows for sigh in options you can use a stick but i do not want to use that every time so i chose pin or finger print. but thanks she will have to start doing backup. i did see her drive is partitioned but did not have time to check to see if she had her photos and docks on that partition. i may have her drop it off again and go thru her drive to see if i can salvage anything for her. thanks for the help

Typically a USB stick would be used if you have something like BitLocker drive encryption enabled and you require a USB stick for authentication to unlock the drive.

Your idea is a good one - I used to do something similar for my mom and sisters. I had my own Admin level account on their systems to act as a failsafe in case they fouled something up in their accounts.

Hiren's boot cd...

dacrone said:

Hiren's boot cd...

so what is that ? Hiren's boot cd... ok i see it is a cd that is bootable but do they have that in a thumb drive type setup. some laptops don't have the cd tray. hers did not have that thanks

Hiren's BootCD PE

make bootable via rufus OR, and i recommend, making an Easy2Boot usb and you can just drop ISOs onto it
boot into Hiren's Boot PE and remove/reset the password to whatever account desired
restart machine from Windows and password is now removed

i have the esd bootable thumb for resetting and reinstalling windows so is there instructions showing how to do this? insead of making the cd just make it a thumb drive?

Try3 said:

Clean Install - TenForumsTutorials

Denis

thanks i did that using the esd stick i have. i did find that how to install the Hiren's BootCD PE onto a thumb drive but at the end of the video it says to boot my pc. i do not want to boot my pc to this and take a chance on doing something to my pc. so maybe i do not have to reboot my pc but can just take the stick and save it for the time i have to do this again. but in the video it says to download 1 file and it show doing another file and then just running the 2nd file the iso file, i did not see where the 1st file came into play here. so what was the reason that video said to download the 1st file and then not use that file? this is the first file the video said to download. HBCD_PE_x64.iso(Thanks to all our Supporters for providing fast and reliable mirror servers)

this is the second file Download ISO2USB.exe to your computer. and then he just ran this file, so what was the point of downloading the 1st file. thanks.