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I stupidly removed myself from the administrators group in Windows 8.1 and need to add myself back in (note that I'm using a local user account).

I booted into the recovery console and have tried the following:

net user administrator /active:yes

This supposedly enables the administrator account. However, when I restart I don't have an option to log in as administrator.

net localgroup "administrators" "<username>" /add

Results in

There is no such global user or group: <username>

If I just run net user it only lists Administrator and Guest.

Is there anything else I can try?

Ben Foster
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  • It sounds like you were using the default `Administrator` account instead of a user account within the `Administrator` user group. Is this the case? I will assume its not. If you had not logged into the Administrator account, then I would set the default account to Administrator, to force the profile to be created otherwise it won't be listed as an option. Your syntax seems incorrect based on the fact the syntax provided in the following answer is different http://superuser.com/questions/662409/installing-the-windows-8-1-update-on-a-non-admin-account?rq=1. – Ramhound Nov 25 '13 at 19:49
  • I should add that the default Administrator account should have been active by default already anyways. This is at least the in my experience when I upgraded a Windows XP virtual machine, to Windows 7, to Windows 8 a year ago. – Ramhound Nov 25 '13 at 19:53

1 Answers1

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In the end I booted up in Safe Mode and was able to log in as the Administrator account. I then launched cmd prompt and was able to add myself back into the Administrators group with:

net localgroup "administrators" "<username>" /add

I'm of the belief that changes made in the recovery console were not actual being applied to my windows installation (yet I was not given the option to choose an installation). I'd created a few users within the recovery console and these do not exist in Local Users and Groups.

Ben Foster
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  • So your recovery console doesn't see your user with `net user` and users added in the recovery console are not visible in Windows. Weird. Are you sure you were connected to the right Windows-version in recovery console? You could try creating a file in `C:` in recovery and seeing if it's on `C:` in Windows. – Rik Nov 25 '13 at 21:04