The other day a buddy of mine had lost access to his Windows 7 administrator account because he forgot his password. He turned to me for help and as usual I was willing to lend a hand. The following tutorial covers the process of breaking Windows administrator password on Windows 8/7/Vista/XP when you forgot it.

Windows stores its user information, including encrypted versions of the Windows login passwords, in a file called sam. This file is commonly found in \windows\system32\config. This file is also a part of the registry, in a binary format and not easily accessible. We will use a professional utility called Password Recovery Bundle to preform the recovery.

Breaking Windows Administrator Password:

  1. Download Password Recovery Bundle on another computer you have access to, then install it.
  2. Launch Password Recovery Bundle and click Windows Password button, the pop-up dialog enables you to burn the ISO image of Reset Windows Password to a blank CD, DVD or USB flash drive.
  3. Reboot your locked computer and set the BIOS or Boot Menu to boot from the CD/DVD or Removable Device.
  4. Restart the computer and it’ll load the Windows password reset disk.
  5. After reaching to the Reset Windows Password program, you’ll see the Windows SAM registry hive and all Windows accounts saved in it.
  6. Select the administrator account whose password you want to break, then click Reset Password button. The program will instantly break Windows administrator password and remove the password saved in the SAM database.

Reboot your computer and remove the Windows password reset disk, you’ll be able to log in to the administrator account without typing a password.