A friend recently recently changed jobs and when he left, he was given his old laptop. It is running Windows 7 Ultimate and had previously been part of a domain, but the IT folks there removed it from the domain and added a login account for him before he left
Unfortunately the account they created for him appears to be a standard account and they did not provide the credentials for an admin account (assuming there is even one there). We only found this out when trying to create a new login for his daughter.
I have tried the command problem to enable the built in administrator account, but when I try to launch an elevated command prompt, the "Yes" button in the UAC dialog is grayed out. I've tried going into safe mode to enable the account, but I still can't get an elevated command prompt.
I have a Windows 7 Ultimate CD laying around so I booted to the CD and went to "Repair your computer". I tried the `net user` command again and was given a message that the account was activated. I went back to a regular bootup, tried to login with the Adminstrator account, but was told the account was disabled.
So I went back to the CD and tried `net user` again from the command prompt without any switches to get a list of the current users. I was only shown "Administrator" and "Guest", and not even the standard account we know is working. There was also an error message below the list of users indicating that there were errors in commend, but no indication of what the error was or any other details.
So we're left with a working computer with apparently no working admin account. Short of reinstalling everything (which is the nuclear option I was trying to avoid, does anyone else have any ideas on how I can get a working admin account, or help me figure out what the `net user` command is not working?