Creating another Admin account from a Live CD

slipd · 2 Oct 2019 at 22:58

Hi guys,

Bit of background: My neighbour's family PC has been 'hijacked' - by his kids. Totally his fault, the password he and his wife share was left on a post-it note, on the side... his boys were mucking about and have changed the password. Now no one knows what it is!

I've been out of the game for a while and not really practised properly any Windows adminy stuff since 7. Is it possible with 10 to boot into a Live CD, I used to use a program called Spotmau, which my work very kindly *ahem*, gave me. It allowed you to change/reset user passwords but also add/remove accounts amongst other bits and bobs.

I was wondering if something like that was still viable with 10 or have MS tightened up on it? If I can't suggest him a solution I think he wants a fresh start with accounts (all users are just 'users' atm) but I'm against this, as it'll probably be that has to do all their backing up etc.

Thoughts?

Zefan · 2 Oct 2019 at 23:16

AFAIK the old faithful method of using recovery media command line to replace stickykeys with CMD.exe still works, whereby you can then open cmd at the login prompt by whacking shift 5 times. From there it's just using netuser to reset passwords.

On Holiday · 2 Oct 2019 at 23:20

slipd · 3 Oct 2019 at 09:15

Thanks people, have passed info on!

slipd · 4 Oct 2019 at 13:55

Quick one guys, how do you reverse the hack?

One user from the link suggests:

c:
cd windowssystem32
del utilman.exe
ren utilman.exe.bak utilman.exe
wpeutil reboot

But apparently that doesn't work? - incidentally, I've not tried this myself

On Holiday · 4 Oct 2019 at 14:01

slipd · 4 Oct 2019 at 14:12

WoodyUK said:
Once you're back in windows you can just navigate to the folder in explorer and perform the renames there

From looking at those commands listed though, just doing "C:" isn't always going to get you to the "C:\" path, so skip that and do
cd C:\Windows\System32
instead of "cd windowssystem32"

Thanks Woody! In my haste I didn't read all of the posts... another user posted a solution: copy c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe.bak c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe

Works a treat apparently! Thanks everyone, useful stuff.