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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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Right, So I actually did something similar. On some version of windows I noticed that ctrl-backspace was adding another character to the password, instead of deleting it. So I included it in my password. Then I updated to a new version of windows and got locked out since they updated the password backend to where it would actually delete the password instead of a adding the character, so I had no way of typing out my password. Ended up just nuking the computer.
I know, this is easier said than done for someone unfamiliar with this stuff, but maybe still good to know that this is an option in future:
You can prepare a "Linux Live USB" and select in the BIOS that it should boot off of that.
It'll start a complete OS off of that USB, so you can access the hard drive (assuming you didn't enable disk encryption) and at the very least backup your files, or sometimes even resolve whatever keeps you from accessing Windows.
This sort of nonsense right here is why infosec people warn about having physical access to machines
It’s not just because of nonsense, it’s more that it doesn’t really matter what you do - the only thing stopping someone with physical access to your machine is their level of determination.
At some point, there’s no stopping the laws of physics. Your data is physically stored there. You can do a lot to make it really difficult to access it, but the best you can do is full disk encryption with a sufficiently strong key, and only store that key on external hardware that isn’t accessible to the attacker.
Even then, you better make sure that your encryption key wasn’t hanging around cached anywhere in memory before you shut down your computer.
You can't really prevent physical access to a machine. Using Bitlocker is a lot better recommendation, because it prevents this kind of attack in most of the cases.