Administrator account gone...What to do now?

[nugz45]

Ok let me take a deep breath before I begin...

So this all started with running NewSID from SysInternals on my Vista64 machine. Yes I knew the risks, but it seemed 50/50 from what I had read on other forums around the Internet so I went ahead and took my chances with it.

Sure enough, NewSID hung up just like a lot of people said it would, and I was forced to kill the process and restart. NewSID seemed to do its job, as my PC thought it had been started for the first time, only some things were very odd.

My original Administrator account had been demoted to a guest account. This is the only account available at my log in screen. Looking under my Users folder, I see my old user account folder jakt, and a second folder called jakt.jakt-pc. (This is in the format of <user>.<domain>) All my data remains. Files are all there, programs all still run fine, drivers still intact. Under my Local Users and Groups in Computer Management, I see only two users in my Administrators usergroup. S-1-5-21-XXXXXXXXXX-XXXXXXX-1000 and S-1-5-21-XXXXXXXXXX-XXXXXX-500. I believe this is my previous SID before running the NewSID utility. No clue where this came from, or how to log in under this account, or if it is even possible to use this account.

So...after a few hours of messing around and unsuccessfully being able to restore my old account to Adminitrator priviledges, I figure I am just going to try and undo this entire operation.

First, I try to start System Restore. I was not so confident to not create a restore point before attmpting to create a new SID. Sadly, this does me no good as I am greeted with an error on start up of System Restore which reads, "Class not registered (0x80040154)". This repeats endlessly and there is no getting in to System Restore. Bummer.

Ok fine, we will just do this Rambo style and insert the installation CD I said to myself. Again I am greeted with an error message. "0x000000e9 I/O error" . It goes on to say something about errors with removable storage or hard drives or cd roms which may be failing. Well I dont have any removable storage connected, and I am pretty sure my hardware is good to go. Anyways, I am guessing the disc is bad. I tried to get the autorun.inf to load in Windows and it gives me corruption error messages there, so I guess the disc is bad. Double bummer.

I also tried doing the whole F8 thing at boot up and looking for some options there and there was nothing that seemed helpful. Triple bummer.

I guess my question is, what now? Honestly I wouldnt even mind reformatting at this point. I would rather not, but I have all my important stuff on a separate partition so its no biggy if I have to. Although that will be difficult when my disc wont even take me into Repair/Install. I am really just looking for a way to elevate my original account to Administrator priviledges from a guest account, or some way to run a repair on my Vista installation
and get things back to normal or how I had them before all this, also difficult without a working Repair disc. Any ideas?

Sorry for the novel, but being a PC fix it man myself, there is nothing worse than those who provide too little information.

 

[alphanumeric]

I've never used Vista but in XP the administrator account doesn't normally show up on the welcome screen. Once you create at least one other user account it disappears. You should still be able to log in as administrator if you wish though. At the welcome screen try hitting crtl=>alt=>del twice to bring up the classic login box. Then type in administrator for the user name and the password if you set one, leave it blank if you didn't and hit enter.

 

[TechieSooner]

I'm assuming THE Administrator account was changed here... and that your account isn't Administrative rights, and the issue is you cannot run Administrative commands.

As for System Restore not working, I did a little research and your F8 option at bootup and choosing the Last Known Good Configuration has known to help some folks.

At any rate, with all the issues your system has, I'd just do a reinstall. You'd never have to worry about something being jacked up again. Your disk may not be bad, honestly, might just be corrupted files in Windows itself- have you tried booting from it? I think Windows is just fudged, more info on the System Restore search I did was that it's got to do with COM+ and some registered DLLs, although I didn't find much info on which DLL it was.

Since all your groups and permissions seem fudged up, my personal opinion would just be to reinstall and be safe.

 

[bigdogchris]

Does Ghost automatically create a new sid? I use ghost at work and have never had issues with SIDs before.

 

[Nenu]

It looks like he didnt create a backup before creating a new SID (despite extensive research on the topic).
His reasons for creating a new SID havent been mentioned.

 

[SkullE]

XP has a password reset tool on the net. Put it on a floppy and boot it up. linux will boot and do its thing to reset it.

Check to see if it works with vista......or may be a new version.

just google for XP password reset tool

 

[brewcrew814]

Does Ghost automatically create a new sid? I use ghost at work and have never had issues with SIDs before.

I believe ghost does not create a new SID. We ghost our machines and have to run newsid after ghosting as part of our procedure. I think it might only matter depending on your environment. I'm still learning myself; so somone else can interject on this
When we had a domain migration from NT4.0 to 2003 windows domain; we had to run newsid on every computer in the company because they just ghosted and deployed them.

 

[Burnout01]

NewSID doesn't do the same thing as Sysprep. After the reboot, it should not have asked you info like the first time you started windows. Sound like your system will be getting a fresh install.

The SID is the most important thing on a PC when dealing with a Domain. Ghost copies the image so it will have the same SID. So every PC with the same SID would cause havok. Running NewSID after a Ghost image is fine.