I had been unable to update a Win 10 VM created from an older ‘create windows cube’ utility, because the updates were failing due to (my theory) being too far behind or something incompatible in the update was broken/mismatched. My Win10 version was stuck on something like 20H trying to go to 21H when the current version was 22H and updating it just sent me into an almost endless cycle of reboots to install/remove/cleanup and the windows update troubleshooter did nothing to help.
I then found a Microsoft update utility that would supposedly update a machine directly to the latest version 22 but in doing so it detected something in the Qube was not in the standard location so it removed all the custom applications, apparently including the Qubes windows utilities and thus the password-less login also disappeared as well.
So, I am now staring at a Windows 22 login prompt and can not install the Qubes utilities to begin reinstalling applications. Does anybody have a clue what default userid/password might get me back in considering that the ‘create windows cube’ utility created the original VM? I tried “user” with a blank password, and tried my normal email windows login but nothing I can come up with will gain access to the vm. Any clue what the default was set to or do I need to go read the source of that vm creation utility?
Resetting a password apparently requires a USB stick but without the Qubes utilities installed first that can not be done. The local domain pw is needed because my Microsoft account id/pw also doesn’t work.
When I saw that it would erase everything I did clone the VM first and copied what I needed to a network drive before proceeding, and that clone does run so in theory I could change the password there, clone it again, and repeat the update on that clone. At least I would know the password then.
Any advise?
thanks.