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ChrisFlag for United States of America

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Unable to change local admin password via cmd

I am unable to see the local hard drive upon going into windows recovery. I am trying to reset the local admin password via the recovery cmd prompt. I also do not see the utilman.exe file that I am to rename and copy in the windows\system32 folder. This is a VMWare server Windows 2k16.

Drive that I can see in cmd are the following:

A:
D:
X:

Thanks in advance!
Avatar of Devin Becker
Devin Becker
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Hi,

Are you able to open Local Users and Groups via the cmd? you can try this by just typing "lusrmgr" in the command line

Or you could try to create a new administrator account using:
 "net user USER_NAME PASSWORD /add"   followed by   "net localgroup administrators USER_NAME /add"

Hopefully this helps

Devin Becker
Avatar of Chris West
Chris West

Thanks Devin but that won't work. When I try with the only account I can get in with, Windows errors out since the local account fell out of the local admin group.
The odds are that the Windows drive is D when you boot to recovery media.  In the CMD window type DIR D:<enter> and see if the Windows folder is listed.  If it is, just substitute D:\ every place your instructions say C:\.
P.S. I've used the UTILMAN trick several times.
Avatar of Chris

ASKER

Hi Davis,

D is the source dvd which has no windows\system32 folder.
X: does have the windows\system32 folder but utilman.exe does not exist

I thought that X: might have been the cached os drive but there is only a "public" account under users.
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