How to Crack & Recover Your Forgotten Windows User Password

We always set passwords to secure our personal computer information and resources. When using Microsoft Windows 10 if you forgot your password and you have not mapped your Windows live account, it’s hard to recover the password, specially if you have not set up your security question. 

And if you have mapped your Windows Live ID on Windows Login screen you can click on forgot password and a guided wizard will be started to reset your Windows Live ID password and using that password you can log in to your computer.

The other option to recover the password is to use third party software. In this tutorial I will explain how you can recover your forgotten password using Password Recovery Bundle by Top Password Software INC.

You can download and install the software by visiting www.top-password.com. Once downloaded and installed, run password recovery bundle.

You will see 4 options on the right side of the software, the “Start Recovery” option can help you to recover the password from different software.

The “Recover from File” option help to recover the password from zip file or Microsoft Excel files and many more.

The “Windows Password” option is the one we will be using, this option let us recover / reset forgotten Windows passwords. Click on “Windows password” and it will show you two options.

Create Password Reset Bootable Disk

This option will open up a dialog box to create a bootable disc or USB. If your computer supports USB booting, Select the USB option and click “Start Burn”.

It will image the necessary files on the USB drive so that your computer can boot from the USB  and help you to recover the password.

Recover Local User Password

This option helps you to recover the password using SAM file. SAM file is a file that store Windows local accounts username and password in encrypted form.  

There are different methods to decrypt this file to retrieve the password. Sam file cannot be directly accessed when the computer is running or logged on. To import the SAM file, follow the following steps.

Run command prompt using administrative permissions.

Write these two commands to copy the SAM and SYSTEM file to the C: drive.

reg save HKLM\SAM C:\sam
reg save HKLM\SYSTEM C:\system

Running these two commands will copy SAM and SYSTEM file your local disk C.

Now browse to select the SAM file copied to the C: drive.

The software will read the SAM file and retrieve a list of user accounts.

Select the account name for which you want to recover the password and click “Recover Password” button.

Then select the method you want to use to recover your password. There are three methods supported for recovering the password.

Brute-Force Attack

Brute force attack is a method that is used to recover the password by making different combinations of letters, numbers, symbols, and special characters to find the correct password combination.

Typically it takes a long time when recovering long passwords as it may run millions of combinations to find the correct password.

Mask Attack

Mask attack is used when you know a portion of the password, say you have a password of 9 characters and you know last 4 characters as GRAM,  it’s useless to run a brute force attack for 9 characters combination in this case we will define 5 practice combination that will start from aaaaa to zzzzz and it will retrieve the password as INSTAGRAM

Make sure to enter a question mark symbol ( ? ) for all characters you don’t remember.

Dictionary Attack

In this method generates hundreds and thousands of dictionary words to find the password.

This dictionary is also made by software vendor with potential words of the password used worldwide.

Once you have selected the attack method, as in this case we have selected brute-force click next.

Now it will start finding that combination to decrypt the password and will show the results. 

For a faster process of retrieving forgotten passwords GPU is highly recommended on your computer, as the software will use GPU and CPU power combined to determine the password.

Without GPU it will work but it will work slowly and will take a very long time.

It will retrieve the password for the selected account. Click Exit to close the program.

Muhammad Imran Habib

Imran is a technology evangelist with 8 years of experience working with some of the Industry leading companies. Imran's expertise includes On-Prem/Virtual Infrastructure deployments, IT Solutions for SMEs, End User Computing Support.

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