Creating another Admin account from a Live CD

[slipd]

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?

 

[slipd]

Thanks people, have passed info on!

 

[slipd]

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

 

[slipd]

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.