Corrupted the SAM File

[ahuckphin]

I was working on a laptop, attempting to reset the password to a local user account. I first tried chntpw through Ubuntu and later tried NT Password Reset through Hiren's BootCD PE. Both was unsuccessful. During my last attempt, I clicked "Unlock" in addition to "Change Password" in NT Password Reset and after this, the computer will just blue screen when attempting to boot into Windows 10 giving me the error: System License Violation. No difference when I tried to boot into safe mode. I did not make a backup of the SAM file, so is it best I just reinstall Windows now? 

[Bad5ector]

There used to be an old Windows XP Kb article (KB307545) that describes how to recover from a corrupted registry and I believe one of the files copied is the SAM hive. Maybe there is a more recent KB article that would be relevant to your version of Windows, but there might still be a way.