Reset a lost or expired Windows administrator password
If you are no longer able to access your Windows Amazon EC2 instance because the Windows administrator password is lost or expired, you can reset the password.
Note
There is an AWS Systems Manager Automation document that automatically applies the manual steps necessary to reset the local administrator password. For more information, see Reset passwords and SSH keys on EC2 instances in the AWS Systems Manager User Guide.
The manual methods to reset the administrator password use EC2Launch v2, EC2Config, or EC2Launch.
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For all supported Windows AMIs that include the EC2Launch v2 agent, use EC2Launch v2.
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For Windows AMIs before Windows Server 2016, use the EC2Config service.
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For Windows Server 2016 and later AMIs, use the EC2Launch service.
These procedures also describe how to connect to an instance if you lost the key pair that was used to create the instance. Amazon EC2 uses a public key to encrypt a piece of data, such as a password, and a private key to decrypt the data. The public and private keys are known as a key pair. With Windows instances, you use a key pair to obtain the administrator password and then log in using RDP.
Note
If you have disabled the local administrator account on the instance and your instance is configured for Systems Manager, you can also re-enable and reset your local administrator password by using EC2Rescue and Run Command. For more information, see Using EC2Rescue for Windows Server with Systems Manager Run Command.
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