I am new to server administering and learning and I have an old dell server with windows server 2008 standard installed. I almost forgot the password for the admininstrator account so I went in and changed it from the control panel user section. Now after reboot the administrator button vanished. It was the only administrator account. What happened and how do I log in as admin now? Ive looked and cannot see anybody with this same issue on searching. I logged on to a normal user account and looked at properties of the user groups and I see the Adminstrator account there and it doesnt say its disabled. It just doesnt want to show on login screen for some reason.
1 Answer
I was able to solve the issue by creating a usb boot disk. Then in recovery console I forced the cmd prompt to open where I replaced an utilman.exe to cmd.exe superbly explained here: http://www.top-password.com/blog/4-ways-to-enable-built-in-administrator-account-on-windows/ Then i tried activating the administrator by using net user administrator /active:yes that didnt fix my issue. So i found another link that showed me how to create an entirely new user and assign it to administrators group shown here: Create admin user from command line.
Thank you Ramhound for starting me at the right direction.