Windows 10 mystery?

[VTChev1616]

So I have a story and a few questions that hopefully a few of you might find entertaining. My girlfriend's father has Parkinsons/dementia and managed to lock himself out of his Windows 10 laptop recently. This might be a long post, you have been warned.

Background:
About 4 months ago, we setup his laptop with a fresh Windows 10 Pro install (complete format wipe). Apparently you need the Pro version for people inside an assisted living facility... Anyways, I setup a password in the BIOS to prevent him from formatting again or installing as well as disabled the USB and CD drives via the admin BIOS settings. The second step was to create his personal NON-ADMIN account after I setup the admin account. I used the registry editor to disable the CD and USB ports so nothing could be accessed by all users. On top of that I setup a 10 character password with a time-out function if he attempted the passwords 10 times on the admin account, it would lock him out for 4 hours. This part was requested by my girlfriend's mother. I did not have a password for his account so he could just log in at his leisure.

Today:
Fast forward to this week. He somehow managed to forget his password and the admin account was gone... attempts to safe boot still required his password as well. Not sure how that's possible. Upon detailed inspection and disassembly, I discovered that 1) nothing was on his storage drive (an Intel SSD in this case) and 2) there was a Windows 7 Home installation disc inside the cd drive.

So the questions...

1) Is is possible to use a Windows 7 Home CD in conjunction with the reset password option at the login to create a new administrator account in Windows 10?
2) Is it possible to still access his newly minted admin account without using the windows 10 installation ISO or CD?

Regardless, I do plan to wipe the computer and reset it after I clean the spilled soda out of all the parts...

All of this is more of a curiosity and a mystery. Although my girlfriend and her mother are irritated, I think this meme is appropriate for me.

http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/c6/c6e184c37df932d599fc1db174c7c7b2c8caf5400bc6b13d6865c1393f7b3122.jpg

 

[COLGeek]

1. No. No.
2. Not likely.

It seems someone attempted to install Win 7 and failed, but ended up wiping the SSD in the process. Check the boot order in the BIOS. Is the optical drive the primary boot device? Also, is the BIOS password still in effect (removing one is usually not that difficult)?

 

[ss202sl]

no password support here.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/19-73-forum-rules-read-first

 

[VTChev1616]

So the boot order was still the SSD, then USB, then the CD drive. I went back and noticed that there were 4 partitions instead of the typical 3 I have seen recently for most boot drives. I will have to agree that there was an attempt at a Windows 7 install that failed. My guess is there may have been an attempt through "resetting" the password on the login screen, but I don't know. So my guess is there was some weird collapse of the system between the windows 7 install attempt.

The BIOS password was still in effect and the boot from a CD or USB was disabled.

As for cracking the password, not my intention, mainly a curiosity with regards to the computer. Thank you for pointing out my error.

 

[COLGeek]

Seems a simple case of someone trying to undo the previous restrictions as previously mentioned. BTW, there was no request by the OP to bypass anything. Good luck getting the system back in order.

Given the gentleman using the device, you might consider having no password at all on his account. This will let him log in automatically and prevent (minimize) the likelihood of him attempting to bypass anything in the future. Just a thought.