Once the key is created shut-down the Windows PC, insert the thumb drive if the USB key was created on another computer, and turn on the PC - be sure to boot from the USB drive. If you need instructions, the article on How to make a Fedora USB stick is a great reference. You can use another computer to download the utility and use a USB thumb drive, or other form of media to copy the package.įirst and foremost we need to create the Fedora Live USB stick. You can find the builds for your Fedora version from the Fedora Project’s Koji site. If you’re unable to access the internet, no sweat! Fedora Workstation Live boot media has all the dependencies installed out-of-the-box, so all we need is the package. If the PC can connect to the internet after booting the live media, install chntpw from the official Fedora repository with: $ sudo dnf install chntpw The article will also cover some of the features of chntpw used for basic user administration. Hence, this article will go through the steps I used to successfully reset a Windows local user password using chntpw and a Fedora Workstation Live boot USB. Little did I know at the time there was more to this utility than explained in the summary. With dnf search I found a utility called chntpw: $ dnf search windows | grep passwordĪccording to the summary, chntpw will “change passwords in Windows SAM files.” After 20 minutes of scouring the net and scanning through the Microsoft Docs with no success, I turned to my development machine running Fedora with hopes of finding a solution. It’s an easy fix using the Windows 7/8/10 installation media to reset the Administrator password, remove the PC off the domain and rejoin it. Needless to say, I’ve encountered this issue many times in my career.

He gave me 30 minutes to resolve the issue while he attended a meeting. The user is an executive and the hindrance of his computer can affect real-time mission-critical tasks. I recently encountered a problem at work where a client’s Windows 10 PC lost trust to the domain.

Pcunlocker unable to read sam database