How to get Administrator password from an EC2 Windows Instance

After the instance has been launched, from the EC2 console:

right-click on the Windows instance > Instance Settings > Get System Log

find the <Password>..</Password> tag and select and copy its content. This is the Administrator password, but ciphered with the Key-Pair you have selected when you first launched your instance.

Now, open a terminal window (i am using putty to ssh to my ubuntu server)

cd ~
nano EC2WindowsPassword.log
paste the password here, save and exit
base64 -d -i -w 0 ./EC2WindowsPassword.log | openssl rsautl -decrypt -inkey .ssh/Amazon-keyPair.pem > EC2Windows.Password

That’s it! Open EC2Windows.Password file and get your password.