Passwords mangled after Auto Repair with EasyRE Win 8

eikelein

Member
I almost said YIPEE when my wife's Lenovo AiO Win 8.1 booted again.
But then it came: BOTH admin accounts have their passwords changed. Can not login at all.
I am desperate... Any help is greatly appreciated.
TIA
 
There was (is?) a virus that changed Windows passwords and locked out the owner.
Research that ?
 
@Terry60 and Ex_Brit,
thanks for replying.
Yes, I was amiss to say that I had tried Caps Lock and empty passwords and InitCaps in all combinations.

Luckily I got around this obstacle with help of an unbelievable trick. The machine has a third account for grand kids that never had a password; that allowed me to get into this third standard account. In there as a standard user I could start the regular password manager GUI. When I tried to change, i. e. to empty the admin account passwords the normal little window came up that asked for an admin account and it's password. This then accepted the original password for both accounts! After that I could log in to both accounts correctly without a password. Go figure.

The first reboot took VERY long! I then discovered that EasyRE must have created an additional partition of 1000MB size(!). My suspicion is that EasyRE boots into this partition and does there "it's own" password check which fails if there is a password to check.

Then eventually EasyRE transfers control to the "normal" system partition.

Malware checks (in the running system) came up empty but I still will do an off line check of the disk and that new partition which btw. has the name (label) WINRE.

What a mess! Luckily I had paid with Paypal; I have requested a full refund and will give them a week to reply. If NeoSmart does not reply and/or refund I will start a Paypal dispute and I plan to pull the stops out. All the many Windows related support forums I am a member of will hear about this, believe me.

Again thanks for investing your time and replying.
 
What a mess indeed. I'll leave it to others to answer this last post. I have alerted the software developer. As far as I know EasyRE shouldn't meddle with passwords or partitions, but I think the experts need to answer that. I do know for a fact that refunds are obtainable if you are unhappy with any paid Neosmart product: Refund Policy - NeoSmart Technologies
 
I'm sure you'll get your refund since it's never arguing in cases like this ("the customer is always right" and whatnot), but you've terribly misunderstood what EasyRE does and are holding the wrong party hostage here, in all events.

EasyRE does not touch the SAM registry hive where passwords are stored during an automated repair. EasyRE also does not create any partitions. When I say these two things, I do not mean "EasyRE does not mess up your passwords and EasyRE shouldn't have created the partition you're seeing" - what I mean is "EasyRE is not physically capable of changing your passwords or creating a partition because the code to do so (literally) does not (yet) exist." These are features that people have requested from us off and on for a few years that we have never implemented. EasyRE can't be responsible for these because, quite simply, we never made it smart enough to do that. Unless we've created an AI completely unawares that is slowly taking over the world, one mangled password at a time, it's not EasyRE to blame.

WINRE is not EasyRE. WinRE is Windows Recovery. That partition is created by Microsoft when you first install Windows on a clean (formatted) drive (or when you buy your PC from the factory). What EasyRE can do is in the process of repairing your PC make Windows recognize and mount partitions that it was previously ignoring (which can cause boot failure if Windows winds up "ignoring" its own system partitions, otherwise).

I have no idea what was going on with your machine (and the dearth of any relevant details or background info in this thread does not help); my suspicion is that you have a rootkit or simply managed to run into the "perfect storm" of events where a virus or failed software update (they're virtually indistinguishable) took your system down, disk corruption wiped out changes to the SAM, EasyRE repaired the failed boot and got your PC back up and running, and then the blame for everything else that was wrong but EasyRE simply hadn't repaired was pinned on EasyRE - but we get that a lot, and you'll have your refund. Glad your PC is working.
 
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