My father’s managed to stuff up his Windows 11 laptop by entering the wrong password too many times. Googling around, it seems he’s not the only one. It’s now insisting on a challenge phrase “A1B2C3” on every boot. That’s fine, he can get past that. But then it asks for his “PIN”. (Strange, but it’s always asked for his alphanumeric password as a “PIN”. In reality I’m sure this his laptop password, not a Windows Hello PIN as he’s never set the latter up.)
Even though we’re sure he’s now got the right password, he then gets an error: “This sign in option is disabled because of failed sign-in attempts or repeated shutdowns. Use a different sign-in option or keep your device powered on for at least 2 hours and then try again.”
Sadly, he’s not got any other sign-in options available. So waiting seems the obvious option. But having waited two hours then 24 hour to be sure, we’ve seen no change. It’s pretty borked. The initial cause might have been a duff password, but something is seriously wrong with the timeout reset.
I think I might be on a hiding to reinstallation, but want to explore all options first:
Forgotten password reset
I believe he’s using an profile linked to his online Microsoft-attached account rather than a local one, but there’s no option to reset one’s “PIN” like I get on my own Windows 10 machine:
Reset from admin account
There’s no admin account set up on the machine, and despite attempts to create one from the recovery console, I’m not in the right context to use net user on the host system. Attempts to get to a command prompt in the right context from Safe Mode fail as that also hits the account lockout.
Ditto for changing the Local Security Policy.
Registry hacking
I started looking into modifying the registry to kill the lockout but don’t know where to look.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesRemoteAccessParametersAccountLockout looked promising but that’s for remote not local access.
I can’t believe it’s this hard to reset a password/lockout with physical access available.
utilman.exe
My next step is to try the utilman.exe approach but I’m not hopeful as Microsoft seem to have locked down each other way too much.
There must be a simpler way to defrig this in person that doesn’t involve reinstalling Windows.
