You may need this tutorial for a number of different reasons. As for me -- a colleague left the company. His company-owned laptop having his Microsoft account as the only available user and we cannot recover his password. We needed his files so we cannot just reset the computer. So our only choice is to create a new local admin account and make sure this never happens again.
Before we begin, please make sure that you have the DVD installer for your Windows OS.
If you're all set, follow along the instructions below carefully:
1. Insert your Windows DVD into your DVD reader.
2. Boot from the DVD. You can do this by pressing the correct key while the computer is starting up. The key to press depends on the computer brand but it is commonly F2 or Esc. Please refer to this article.
3. Once you’re able to boot from the DVD, you will see the Windows Setup. It looks like this:
1. Insert your Windows DVD into your DVD reader.
2. Boot from the DVD. You can do this by pressing the correct key while the computer is starting up. The key to press depends on the computer brand but it is commonly F2 or Esc. Please refer to this article.
3. Once you’re able to boot from the DVD, you will see the Windows Setup. It looks like this:
5. Once the Command Prompt is open, Type the
following commands in order:
*notice the d drive I put in the command. This is the drive where your Windows OS resides. This might be the wrong drive for you if you get errors in running the above command. Most of the times, this should be drive C. So you just replace the drive d: in the above command with drive c: so it will look like:
move c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe
move c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe.bak
copy c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe
If you are still unsure what is the correct drive, type the following command:
wmic logicaldisk get name,volumename
wmic logicaldisk get name,volumename
The correct drive has VolumeName = Windows
6. The screen will be like this:
7. After the two commands above are executed, pull out the Windows DVD installer and restart the computer.
8. Now, we should be able to access the Command Prompt from the logon screen.
9. Click on the Ease of Access button at the bottom-left of the screen.
11. In the Command Prompt, type compmgmt.msc. This will open the Computer Management which is an easier way to create or manage users in your computer.
12. In the Computer Management console, on the left menu, click on Local Users and Groups > User.
13. In here, you can either change the password of a user(e.g Admin) or just create an entirely new user.
*if you decide to create a new user, you will need to restart your computer to be able to login with that.
*if you created a new user, you can continue with the remaining steps. Otherwise, you can close the Computer Management console now and login with the new password.
14. If you want to make your new user as an Administrator, right-click on that user then select Properties.
15. In the Properties window, click on the Member Of tab.
16. Under the Member Of tab, click on the Add button at the bottom.
17. A new window will pop up where you can choose a Group you want to add the new user into. In the textarea, type Administrators then click on Check Names. Now, click OK. Then OK again in the User Properties window to apply the changes and close the window.
18. You can now close the Computer Management console and restart the computer.
19. The new local account you just made should be available now for you to login.