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How to Reset Lost Admin Password for Hyper-V Virtual Machine
What should you do if by chance you forget or lose the administrator account password of your Hyper-V virtual machine? This article showed you the steps of how to reset lost admin password for Hyper-V virtual machine.
By Crystal / Updated on March 8, 2023
Case: Hyper-V Server lost admin password?
I just took over a Windows admin account another company had set up on Hyper-V. The old company can’t give me the old password they used because they “deleted it”. So, I need to reset the admin password. But after I did that, I tried to log in to the admin account and I found that it didn’t work. What am I doing wrong? How should I reset the password for the admin account on the Hyper-V VM?
- Question from community.spiceworks.com
Hyper-V is one of the most popular type-1 hypervisors, allowing virtualization of multiple guest operating systems on the same host server. For example, you can use Hyper-V to create virtual machines and install Windows Server 2016 on virtual machine.
But if you forget or lose the admin password for your Windows virtual machine, just as in the case above, then there could be a potential security risk. And you may prefer to reset it than the time-consuming rebuild of a new virtual machine. How to reset lost admin password for Hyper-V virtual machine?
In this article, I will introduce you how to reset Hyper-V VM admin password step by step. Before you start, please remember to back up that virtual machine in advance to avoid experiencing unexpected data loss.
An efficient free solution to backup Hyper-V VMs
Before you start any operation that could threaten your data security, you’d better perform backups just in case. Some dedicated backup software that allows hot backup and automation can minimal the downtime and further improve your efficiency.
You can try the free Hyper-V backup software AOMEI Cyber Backup. It simplifies the VM backup process and provide an intuitive GUI interface, allowing you to centrally manage the data protection of all VMs on Hyper-V or VMware ESXi host. As for Hyper-V, it supports Windows 8/8.1/10/11, Windows Server/Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 and later versions.
In 2 quick steps, you can create a complete Hyper-V backup task that can be run automatically. Click the following button to download the freeware.
*You can choose to install this VM backup software on either Windows or Linux system.
2 quick steps to create a complete Hyper-V backup task
1. Create Backup Task: Navigate to Backup Task > + Create New Task.
2. Set the Task Name, Backup Type, Device, Target, and Schedule. And then you can click Start Backup.
- Device: cover multiple VMs on the host within one backup task.
- Target: select to back up to a local path, or to a network path.
- Schedule(optional): choose to perform full or incremental backup, and automate execution according to the frequency you specified.
How to reset lost admin password for Hyper-V virtual machine
In fact, on Hyper-V server change administrator password of a virtual machine is essentially the same as the operation on a physical machine. All you need to do is to boot the machine via DVD drive, and use the command line to reset admin password on the login screen by changing the Ease of Access button to Command Prompt. Here are the specific steps:
1. Launch Hyper-V Manager, right-click on the name of target virtual machine and select Settings…
2. Navigate to Hardware > IDE Controller > DVD Drive and attach the Windows system ISO file.
3. Navigate to Hardware > Firmware, select DVD Drive and click Move Up button to move it to the top, and then click Apply.
4. Power on the target virtual machine and boot from the attached ISO file. Click Next on Windows Setup wizard.
5. Click on Repair your computer.
6. Click on Troubleshoot and select Command Prompt in Advanced options.
7. Inside CMD, change the directories to the disk used to install Windows. And run the following command to set the display of the boot menu.
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu yes
bcdedit /set {bootmgr} timeout 15
8. Change director CD to Windows and System32, and replace the utilman file, which is the Ease of Access button on login screen, with Command Prompt. For example:
cd windows
cd system32
ren utilman.exe utilman.123
copy cmd.exe untilman.exe
9. Navigate to Hardware > Firmware, select Hard Drive and click Move Up button to move it to the top, and then click Apply.
10. Restart the target virtual machine, and select Disable Early Launch Anti-Malware Drive in Advanced Boot Options.
11. Click Ease of Access button on the login screen to open Command Prompt.
12. Run the following command to reset the administrator password, replacing the bold black text with your new password.
net user Administrator NewPassword
13. Exit Command Prompt and log in your Windows system with your new password.
Summary
Forgetting or losing the password of your Hyper-V VM admin account can be a big trouble, if you can’t get it back, you may even lose all the data in that virtual machine.
In this article, I showed the steps of how to reset lost admin password for Hyper-V virtual machine. The operation is basically the same as on physical machine. Before you start, please remember to backup Hyper-V VMs in case of unexpected corruption or data loss.
