Forum Discussion
stopping a Pin signin loop, How to get a user login?
Ok, a miracle has happened (and miracles are rare in our business). I got control of the machine again. This is what I did. I have a relatively healthy (the only problem was the pin loop) win 10 pro machine and I had made a recovery thumb drive earlier. So I:
- Did Shift Restart and picked the Use a Device option
- I had a Windows recovery thumb drive made from this machine earlier in a usb port
- I picked USB Drive UEFI
- I picked "Advanced" Restore
- then it was asking which partition I wanted to install windows on. At this I killed the partition window with the x and rebooted the machine.
- the next login prompt was a user prompt. I logged back in and turned all Services back on and tried to turn Pin prompt off. After that I had control of the machine again through reboot/power cycles.
FlashGordon7 wrote:- then it was asking which partition I wanted to install windows on. At this I killed the partition window with the x and rebooted the machine.
- the next login prompt was a user prompt. I logged back in and turned all Services back on and tried to turn Pin prompt off. After that I had control of the machine again through reboot/power cycles.
Hello FlashGordon7,
Though, I can't understand what logic worked here, but in the end if the issue was fixed, that's the most awesome thing. Thanks for your update!
I was looking at msconfig Services this morning and I see why a lot of people are having this problem. One Microsoft tech thread had 1000+ “I’m having this problem too” on the pin loop situation. Services has a “Disable All” option and it is my contention if you have Pin enabled and you Disable All Services you put yourself in a very bad situation (can’t sign in with the pin you know and you can’t reach any other login options). Disable All is easy to do and I’m sure most people think they can’t hurt themselves by choosing it.
I know this recovery thumb fix doesn’t show profound understanding of the underlying components. I got out of the Partition selector because I wanted to look some things up about it, not because I thought the next login was going to give me a user prompt. But the general theme here is if you are having this pin problem try a bunch of different boot cycle options to see if you can wake up the userid login one time. I know that at least the first time going in and out of the Command Prompt login woke the userid login option for me. It makes some sense to me that connecting to a thumb recovery drive might disrupt the pin only boot cycle.
I like Pin but after these problems I wanted to turn it off because losing the whole machine is high cost. In my opinion it’s almost impossible to turn the Pin prompt off once it’s set up. My Windows Hello is turned off and Windows is still demanding a pin at signin. One benefit of toggling Windows Hello off is that Userid Options icon came back to my signon screen after I toggled it off, incredibly important.
One other thought about getting out of this problem. If you are using Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise I’m almost positive Remote Desktop will demand a userid login, not a pin login. It didn’t help in my situation because I have Norton Firewall on by default and it blocks the port (I turn the firewall off when I want to use Remote Desktop).
FlashGordon7 wrote:I was looking at msconfig Services this morning and I see why a lot of people are having this problem. One Microsoft tech thread had 1000+ “I’m having this problem too” on the pin loop situation. Services has a “Disable All” option and it is my contention if you have Pin enabled and you Disable All Services you put yourself in a very bad situation (can’t sign in with the pin you know and you can’t reach any other login options). Disable All is easy to do and I’m sure most people think they can’t hurt themselves by choosing it.
FlashGordon7, Before you hit Disable all, you must check the Hide all Microsoft services option to prevent this issue from happening. Microsoft has always recommended to hide Microsoft services first and then disable third-party services in accordance to perform clean boot: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-perform-a-clean-boot-in-windows-da2f9573-6eec-00ad-2f8a-a97a1807f3dd
You are right about Services. That said, I was using Services to try to debug a problem where File Explorer wouldn't refresh (you'd delete a file and it would still show in file explorer). I actually did try to turn off all non-Microsoft services one time and it didn't fix the File Explorer problem. What did fix the File Explorer problem for me was to uninstall iCloud for Windows. Of all the non-Microsoft Services none of them showed Apple as the Vendor. iCloud for Windows is an "App". Is there some Service that starts all the App's?