Stuck in Win10 safe mode

[MarkOfWA]

I know my admin passwords for standard mode, and usually use a pin to log into Win10.

When rebooting into safe mode, I'm confronted with credentials that seem to be different. No known passwords work with the two safe mode user names. Now the computer is stuck in safe mode with no apparent way to reboot to normal mode so that I can use my administrative access to reset passwords and resume using the computer.

There is no boot-time menu as with prior versions of windows. Getting stuck this way in a newer version of windows seems like a huge step backward in system recoverability. I'm preparing to just wipe the OS back to Win7 if there is no solution.

 

[Saltgrass]

You don't mention about how you got into Safe Mode, but you might open Msconfig.exe and see if you can remove the Safe boot option on the Boot tab.

If you are not actually in Safe Mode, you should be able to get a Boot Device menu from using a Key combination to either get into the bios settings or directly to a menu which would offer a bootable drive for you to boot. I assume you are not using a UEFI version of Windows 10 since you upgraded from Windows 7.

For clarification, you might state your exact situation. It sounds like you set the system to boot into safe mode but cannot log in and now you cannot change it back to a normal boot.

As far as your password, the only thing I could even mention would be to make sure you don't have a caps lock on. If you had been running without using a password, maybe leaving it blank might work.