Reset Windows 7 Password Using Cmd

Forgot Windows 7 password? Or, did someone else who used your computer change the login password? In both cases, you’re helpless if you do not have any Windows 7 password reset disk. The only option left for you is to install the operating system again. As it requires formatting, you’ll loose all your data saved at your hard disk. This article is about How to reset windows 7 password without reinstalling the OS.


How to Reset Windows 7 Password

Power on the computer and the Windows 7 should start. When it displays “Starting Windows” long press the power button to force the system shutdown. Windows 7 will treat this as a start up fault and try to recover from the error. Don’t worry! We’re moving rightly according to our planning.

Step One: Restart your computer and you should get into the Error Recovery window. Select the ‘Launch Startup Repair (Recommended)’ option and hit ‘Enter’.

The startup repair wizard appears and the system starts checking for the problem.

Step Two: As there is no real problem, it can’t find any solution and suggests to use system restore. But, we are not going to use it. Click the ‘Cancel’ button.

Step Three: The Windows 7 attempts to repair the problems automatically. This takes several minutes. So, wait and wait. As there is no problem, Windows will end up with a message stating that “Startup Repair cannot repair this computer automatically”. Now click the button as shown in the picture below to view the problem details.

Step Four: Scroll down to the end of the problem details section and click the link to read the local privacy statement as shown in the picture.

This opens the local privacy statement into a notepad document. You’re not going to read the privacy statement any way. What you need is to search and open some system files using the notepad.

Step Five: Select File > Open from the notepad menu bar.

Step Six: The ‘Open’ dialog window appears. Select ‘Local Disk’ from the ‘Look in’ drop-down menu.

Step Seven: Now go to the Windows > System32 folder and change the file type to ‘All Files’.

Step Eight: Find out the file named as sethc, select it and press the F2 key to rename the file. Give the name as sethc_bak.

Step Nine: Similarly, search for the application file named cmd at the same location. Once found, right-click on it and select ‘Copy’. Now, right-click on an empty space and select ‘Paste’. Another file named as cmd – Copy is created at the same location.

Step Ten: Rename the file ‘cmd – Copy’ to sethc.

Step Eleven: Once done, cancel all the opened windows and finally click the ‘Finish’ button at the ‘Startup Repair’ dialog window.

Step Twelve: Your computer will reboot as usual and the log-in screen will appear. Press the ‘Shift’ key for five times. Voila! The command prompt opens without getting logged into the system. Now you can use this command prompt to reset Windows 7 password.

Reset Windows 7 Password using the Command Prompt

Now you are a step away from resetting the password in Windows 7. At first run the following command to see the exact user names at the computer.

net user

This will show the list of users in the computer. Choose the username for which you want to reset the password.

Now run the following command to reset the password.

net user <user_name> *

Replace the <user_name> with your own. Type your new password and retype it to confirm.

You’ve successfully reset Windows 7 password without any Windows 7 password reset disk. You can now log into the Windows 7 system with the user name and the new password.

Note: After logging in, you would want to get back the original sethc file. Repeat Step One to Step Seven, delete the “sethc” file and rename “sethc_bak” to “sethc”. It will not make any change into the Windows 7 password reset task.