Reset the startup passord

[curtis evans]

A hacker gained access to my friends computer and enabled to the windows startup password and wants to be paid to give her the password. Is there a was to remove the password without booting into windows 10 first?

 

[Trouble]

Hello and welcome to the forum.

A hacker gained access to my friends computer and enabled to the windows startup password and wants to be paid to give her the password. Is there a was to remove the password without booting into windows 10 first?

Possible but it depends on what you are calling a "windows startup password".
Could be a BIOS password, could be a normal account password or something that seems to be more popular lately with these types of hacks, something called SysKey.
Perhaps an image with a smart phone or digital camera, of what you are actually seeing might help someone offer a suggestion.

 

[curtis evans]

Hello and welcome to the forum.

Possible but it depends on what you are calling a "windows startup password".
Could be a BIOS password, could be a normal account password or something that seems to be more popular lately with these types of hacks, something called SysKey.
Perhaps an image with a smart phone or digital camera, of what you are actually seeing might help someone offer a suggestion.

It is the syskey password that was set

 

[Trouble]

You might try this
http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/bootdisk.html
You can download the ISO to make a boot disk about halfway down that page
When you manage to boot from the CD or ThumbDrive don't let It scare you, for the most part the defaults are OK and you'll just need to hit enter a couple times until you get to the section that looks something like this

  Loaded hives:   

    1 - Edit user data and passwords
    2 - Syskey status & change
    3 - RecoveryConsole settings
        - - -
    9 - Registry editor, now with full write support!
    q - Quit (you will be asked if there is something to save)

That's where you'll want to choose #2 to reset / clear the Syskey password.
Good luck.

 

[curtis evans]

Thank you for the suggestion. I tried the software, but the syskey status and change option doesn't show up.
I need something that will work with a Windows 10 operating system.

 

[Trouble]

the syskey status and change option doesn't show up.
I need something that will work with a Windows 10 operating system.

Not sure what you mean by "doesn't show up"?
And as far as it working with Windows 10, I just used it the other day on a Windows 10 machine. It's pretty OS independent since it boots Linux.
The issue might be that you need to adjust your BIOS to support a legacy boot by turning off secure boot. So you can boot to a CD that might not be UEFI compliant.

 

[curtis evans]

the option to reset/clear the passkey is not there. let me give the stats on the computer
Dell all in one
windows 10
I did turn off all of the security protocols in bios and booted to the cd. I also have it on a usb stick and its does the same thing. maybe because its a dell computer im having this issue?