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I have an account that is a Microsoft Account at my office, but the person who used the computer has left, not telling anyone the password. In order to reset the password, I need it to be a local account. All I have is command line access from the Admin account. It's running Windows 8.

I cannot just delete the account, because we have to go through the files first to recover anything we need.

Alternatively, can I copy the files somehow to a new user and then access that account?

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  • You should be able to access the files by taking ownership of the user's profile folder using the default Administrator account.
    – Ramhound
    Nov 25, 2013 at 13:05
  • @Ramhound Can I create a new user account and copy the files to that somehow?
    – sinθ
    Nov 25, 2013 at 15:23
  • As I suggested you can use a Administrator account to take ownership of the folders and files, copy the data, then delete the user's profile. This allows you to then delete the user itself without losing data.
    – Ramhound
    Nov 25, 2013 at 16:09

1 Answer 1

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You will not be able to convert the account, but you can get the files from the command prompt.

As the administrator user use the takeown command to take ownership of the files that you need access to, copy the files off of the computer, wipe the system and create a new user that is not a Microsoft account so this does not happen again in the future.

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  • Is there a difference between takeown and icacls
    – sinθ
    Nov 25, 2013 at 17:53
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    Yes, icacls changes the file permissions on the file to add or remove users to the file permission. takeown will change which user the CREATOR OWNER user points to. Either solution will usually work, however icacls requires that whatever user running the program has Change Permissions rights which could be removed for administrators if a user decided to do so. However you can not remove the Change Permissions rights for the Creator Owner user. So you may end up doing both, use takeown to take ownership then icacls to give your user permissions to read the files. Nov 25, 2013 at 18:00

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