Something happened and your PIN isn't available. Click to set up your PIN again.

happened and your PIN isn't available. Click to set up your PIN again."

When I click 'Set up my PIN' nothing, the same message reappears

Dryvlyne,  Funny, I said exactly what you said about how serious this bug is and that Microsoft should pay attention in this thread about 50 posts back.   I think part of it is the DATES of technical advice you are getting.   I think 2/3 years ago you could turn off all services or go into diagnostic mode and it didn't kneecap you so there was a lot of advice out there saying to turn all services off to shake problems loose.  Then the Pin thing came up and turning all services off gets much more serious.  Given this Pin problem, Microsoft should ALWAYS offer both login options (Pin and userid) or at least offer it as a Shift Restart Troubleshoot option.

That said I like the Pin.   The world has probably spent millions of hours typing in long passwords and missing them because the password is always masked, even though no one ever watches them login because they are working alone.

I was actually cavalier about this problem.   I was still deliberately turning off all services for several iterations because I really wanted to solve an Apple iCloud problem I was having.   I thought I had the secret sauce for getting the machine back but it got really dicey and I almost lost the machine completely.   I had a near miracle experience where this Microsoft employee was telling me I was dead meat and I killed the Reinstall Windows prompt and the next machine boot it was asking for a userid instead of a Pin.   Miracles are few and far between in our business.  When the machine came back it was perfect and I had about 50 hours of heavy duty development software installs that were still working.   I was lucky.

I wonder what Microsoft broke here that it doesn't allow the login via a password, let alone fixing the pin or using the pin.  Then again, how does a bios update or an ec firmware update trigger such a bug.  Of course, it would help if MS would monitor these discussions so they would hear about the serious bugs they set loose on their users.

Pbug,

       Yes, I understand that you were just changing settings in your bios and that's how you got into the missing Pin problem.  Many others have mentioned that as a cause.  I'm going to speculate that there's something called Fast Boot and I assume Regular Boot that the bios picks for a windows startup.   I assume something having to do with that caused your problem.  So you are trying to fix your problem and turning on all services doesn't help you.   I would try Settings -> Account and then 

turn "Require Windows Hello sign in for Microsoft .... " to Off.   Then at least you will get both a Pin signon and a userid signon in your login screen if you can get enough control of your machine to get back into Settings.

       I think I also understand why those of us who went into diagnostic mode or turned off all services have the Pin problem.   I am now going to use service in the programming sense.  When you turn all services off, your machine does it's normal login, takes the Pin you type in, calls the Pin service that fetches your stored/private Pin, and the service for the Pin doesn't answer because it's told not to start.   Then the part of the operating system that made the Pin service call fails with the worthless error message that is the title of this thread.  If the Pin service doesn't start, nothing is going to log you in with a Pin, and Microsoft, in my opinion should never allow users to stop that service or not start the service because you came in a particular way after the bios boot.   As evidence for my case, when I was able to restore my machine, turn on all services, my pin worked just fine. and was the value that it was before I had the problem.