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Thursday 1 May 2014

Your account has been disabled. Please see your system administrator

Scenario:

A non-domain joined virtual machine (HyperV) that as just been sysprepped.  SCCM Capture has completed, machine has rebooted but you get presented with Username and password field instead of Windows config options. 

You try to log on with local admin account and get the error "Your account has been disabled.  Please see your system administrator".



Assumptions:
  • You've been using SCCM to build machines
  • You didn't activate the admin account

  • You really can't be arsed to go back to the task sequence and make the change then spend 1hr rebuilding the machine
  • You have some form of access to WinPE either via PXE (F12) or USB/CD boot image
  •  
  • Troubleshooting is ENABLED in your BootPE to allow for F8 to envoke a cmd prompt.
Solution:

Now this isn't going to work for everyone but this is a method I've used previously when I've done something dumb like not enabling the local admin account!

Bare in mind this is for when there are NO ACCOUNTS AVAILABLE !  You may have seen this method elsewhere on the net when they then tell you to log in as an administrator....  Really....  When I've just Googled "I've been dumb and forgotten to activate my admin account"...  You're telling me to fix it by logging on as administrator.... REALLY???

Here goes.
  • Boot your machine into WinPE via F12 PXE or via removable media boot disk
  • Hit F8 and bring up the CMD prompt
  • Nav to C:\Windows\System32
  • Enter the following commands:
    • Ren magnify.exe magnify1.exe
    • Ren cmd.exe magnify.exe
  • Reboot your machine
  • At login click the Ease of Access button at the bottom left of the screen – tick the box that says “Make items on the screen larger (Magnifier)” then click apply and if you’ve done everything correctly a command prompt will appear.
  • Enter the following command:
    • Net user administrator /active:yes
      • This activates the administrator account
    • Net user administrator 123
      • (This is telling the administrator account to use a password of 123)
  • Try logging on!!!
  • Don't forget to go and rename magnify.exe to cmd.exe and magnify1.exe to mangnify.exe

3 comments:

  1. That was awesome . I unfucked my VM thanks to this tutorial. Thanks heaps

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Is that a technical term lol! Glad it helped :)

      Delete
  2. Wow, you save my A$$... I reimage 8 PC that did not join the Domain and all the PC Admin account was locked. This worked Thanks

    ReplyDelete

Let me know if this helped.

I'd really appreciate any comments (well, only nice ones) so please feel free to let me know what you think of the blog and also ask for further help...