Reset Forgotten Admin Password on Windows 8 PC With UEFI BIOS

Have you even booted up your PC only to find that you can't remember the administrator password? There are many password recovery tools out there that could be used to recover a password, such as Ophcrack, Offline NT Password & Register Editor, PCLoginNow, etc. But they all become unbootable on Windows 8 PC with UEFI BIOS, then you need to use PCUnlocker.

In this tutorial we'll walk you through the steps to reset a forgotten administrator password on Windows 8 UEFI computers using PCUnlocker.

Step 1: Create a UEFI Bootable CD or USB Drive

Click here to download the zipped ISO image of PCUnlocker and save it to your desktop. The download file is about 153Mb and it contains a UEFI bootable ISO image. Extract the ISO image file from your downloaded file using WinZIP, WinRAR or 7-Zip program.

Now burn the ISO image to a CD using your favorite CD/DVD burning software such as ImgBurn, BurnCDCC, etc. If you want to make a bootable USB drive instead, then try Rufus, ISO2Disc or other programs that supports UEFI partition style. To make a UEFI compatible USB drive, make sure you format the USB drive as FAT32 along with GPT partition table.

Step 2: Change Boot Order

Go to the computer that you’re trying to reset forgotten password for. Now we need to get the PC to boot from the CD or USB drive that we've burned in the step above. Turn on the computer and press a key like F12 to bring up the Boot Menu. The exact key depends on your computer. If you can't find a way to access the Boot Menu, you can either head over to BIOS for changing the boot order: set CD or USB drive as the first boot option.

Step 3: Reset Administrator Password

After successfully booting from the CD or USB drive,  the computer will load the WinPE operating system into the memory. Once the boot procedure is complete, PCUnlocker will start automatically. It displays a list of Windows accounts that are detected from the SAM database on your local hard drive.

Choose the administrator account and click on "Reset Password" button. It will remove/unlock your forgotten password immediately. The last step is click on the "Restart" button to reboot the machine. Also take out the CD/USB drive so this time it will boot from local hard drive.

When you get to the Windows 8 login screen, just left the password blank and you can log on the administrator account successfully. That's it!