I have a Vista Pro. It was in a domain (AD2000), working perfectly. For some test, I had to remove it from the domain. But what I didn't know is that the ONLY local administrator account was actually disabled! So now I can't login as the local admin. Is there any procedure to re-enable it? I don't want to re-install everything. PS: I know its password. It's the account which is disabled.

Well Horinius i think you should have created another account while setting up windows coz i think thats the way windows setup works....just take a look again...and please post me back....

I've tried again with another Vista. Robinson's method works GREAT!! Too bad that I didn't know that before, or I wouldn't have to erase C: partition with an old Ghost image. I was having a doubt when I read your method: logging into administrator account while it is disabled... But it turns out "Safe Mode" is really special! That's something worth learning. To Kowshal: Yes, there was another account but our internal policy is to erase all local account except admin. One of the reason is not to confuse users; they only use domain account and can't use local account. You should have trusted me when I said it's the only account... And for the record: There's another method. That's to use this "Offline NT Password" utility: http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/ No, I'm not interested in resetting the password. It's just that at one step, we'll be offered the option to unlock/re-enable user. But unfortunately this didn't work for that Vista of mine because the utility's O/S (which is Linux) was unable to load driver for the SATA controller of that PC. So the utility was not able to read into the C: partition.

Excellent one. Thanks for the information. It save us from going through the repair process. Works!!!

thanks a lot Robinson....! i have the similar issues this idea worked for me becoz i had only one account which was having limited account access.....so once again thanks....!N.Vijay Kumar.

I have the same problem as the poster above, I have renamed the local admin account to localadmin and its currently disabled due to invalid login attempts. I have tried to use safe mode as suggested here, however, since the local administrator account was renamed to localadmin I cannot use the default administrator account, when I try to log in w/ the locaadmin account it says its disabled, any work around? Thanks, Jason