I am grateful to everyone who tried to help but some things are not as simple as they seem at first glance. Many have tried and some rather arrogantly suggested simple solutions. I have read hundreds of posts and most offer the simple solutions that DO NOT work for this complex problem and NO ONE has offered a solution that comes close to working. Those with the problem and who have tried everything have little hope of getting their version of the OS back.
Only way to do it is to take it to a PC repair shop and hope they have tools to erase your disc and reinstall another version of Win 8.1. But you need the recovery disc to do that and even then it probably won’t work. Nothing new there of course.īUT……no right clicking, registry hack, CMD access, log in, log out as GUEST account or ANYTHING is going to work apart from a re-install. The people having real problems on these posts are those who CANNOT access Admin Rights under any circumstances and are frustrated beyond belief by MS and it stupidity. Wouldn’t it be nice if people actually read the problem as written.
From there, you can change other account passwords or run administrative tasks to restore access to the PC. Select it to regain access to the system. You should now see the administrator account listed on the sign in page. Restart the PC and make sure you are booting from the operating system's drive again. Use ! and q to end the editing and save the values.Select the unlock and enable user account option (4).Enter Administrator as the user account that you want to modify.I'd recommend to tap on enter to try the default path first which usually is detected correctly by the program. You then need to enter the path to the Registry.This may take some time to get right depending on the number of partitions on the PC as it is using the "Linux-way" of listing the hard drives. Select the hard drive that your Windows installation is installed on.Here are the steps that you need to complete: You then need to boot from the selected device to see a DOS-like interface where you need to run a series of command in to restore the user account.
The process itself requires you to download the Offline NT Password & Registry Editor which is available as an ISO image that you can burn to CD or DVD, and a file that you can install on an USB Flash Drive. If you can't sign in anymore you can still recover the system from that by enabling the hidden administrator account. You can for instance request that from a different system or your smartphone. Please note that it may be easier to request the password to be reset if you are using a Microsoft Account password to log in. If you have forgotten your account password and can't log in to the system anymore, you may use the administrator account to get back into the system. Select Run as administrator there.Įnable the account if you can't log in anymore
Enable the administrator account on Windows 8 It is easier to enable the administrator account if you can still log in to Windows with another administrator account. When you list the accounts in the user accounts control panel applet, you will notice that the hidden administrator account is not listed there while the guest account that is also disabled is. One of the reasons is to use it as a fallback account in case you can't log in to a regular user account, or for tasks that require administrative privileges. While it is not suggested to enable and use the administrators on a day to day basis, it can be used for a variety of purposes.
Windows 8 just like its predecessor Windows 7 ships with an administrator account that is disabled by default.