Create a Password Reset Disk in Windows 7

Last Saturday, November 3rd, I did something stupid (more on that later) that resulted in me not being able to log into my Windows 7 PC using any of my Windows accounts.

I have several administrator accounts on my PC.

Having more than one is a good idea if for some reason, you have a senior moment and can't get into the primary administrator account you use on an everyday basis like I do.

Every attempt to enter a password came back with a message indicating I had entered an invalid password. Ultimately, I had to restore my Windows 7 system and rebuild my entire system.

I had a good back of 99.9% of my system, so I'm in good shape that way.

While my inability to log in was likely a corruption of my Windows environment (more on that later) it would have been nice if I had had a Password Reset Disk to try.

Microsoft recommends creating a password reset disk when you first create your password. In theory, you only need to create this password reset disk once---even if you change your account password hundreds of times.

According to the documentation, it's useful if you forget your Windows password (I can assure you I didn't forget the passwords to 4 different Administrator accounts.)

I'm honestly not sure what would have happened if I had a password reset disk, but I have one now.


Creating one is easy---you need some sort of removable media, either a USB flash drive or a write-able CD. (Interestingly, Microsoft says in its documentation you can also use a floppy disk. When was the last time you saw one of those? I thought Windows 7 had pulled support for them?)
Insert your removable media, and open User Accounts by clicking on the

Start button--->Control Panel--->User Accounts and Family Safety--->User Accounts.

In the left pane, click Create a password reset disk. A wizard, entitled Forgotten Password Wizard, appears with these instructions.

"This wizard helps you create a "password reset" disk. If you forget the password for this user account and are unable to log on, you can use this disk to create a new password. Note: No matter how many times you change your password, you only need to create this disk once."

Click next and you'll be prompted to confirm the location of your password key disk.

Click next and you'll be prompted for your current user account password. If the account does not have a password, leave the box blank. (Having no password is a bad idea, especially for Administrator accounts.)

Enter your password, and a password reset file will be created for you on your removable media. It is called

userkey.psw

If you have multiple accounts, and you want a password recovery disk for each one, you'll need to repeat this process for each account.

Since the wizard attempts to write a file with the same name to the root folder of your removable disk, you'll either need to have a different removable media for each account, or create a folder for each userkey.psw file and save them all that way.

However, if the occasion ever arises and you need to log in to Windows using the password recovery disk, Windows will look in the root folder of your removable media for the file.

The moral of the story?

Don't do anything stupid like I did, and create your password recovery disk today.

In a future blog entry, I'll discuss using a password recovery disk to log into your Windows PC.