If you don't know the Administrator password or if it's disabled, you'll need to boot into a different OS to reset the password or otherwise get system-level access. I'm partial to using Universal USB Installer to produce a live Ubuntu disk and then using that to copy cmd.exe
to sethc.exe
. (Make a back-up of sethc.exe
before you write over it!) When Windows comes back up to the login prompt, hit Shift five times, and you'll have a command prompt running as SYSTEM
, from which you can do anything.
If you have a Windows recovery disk or the installation media, you do the same tricks without any of the Linux.
Once you get the admin command prompt, you can run net localgroup administrators /add matdoidge
to make your normal account an admin. (To enable the Administrator account, do net user administrator /active:yes
.)