Administrator account accidentally deleted

Hi All,

Been awhile since I've been here! My son just "upgraded" his Win'98 to XP-Pro and didn't think he needed the account "Administrator ". Is there a way to restore it? It shows up under users in the management console, but there is nothing in the welcome screen. We tried making a new user with "Administrator" and renaming his account, but both instances give the error "Administrator account already exists "

Thanks!

Russ

 

According to This Microsoft article you can't delete the administrator account. The article is XP-pro but I'd guess the same would apply to XP-home.

The account will not normally show on the welcome screen unless you've jumped thru some hoops.

Try at the welcome screen to do a pair of CADs (ctrl-alt-del) to get a classic logon and then type in a username of administrator and the appropriate password if there is one and log on from there. If the administrator account still shows up in the management section, this should work.

If that logon doesn't work the account may have been renamed (which you certainly can do) but since you say it still shows up in the management section, I don't think he's done that.

 

There's also another Procedure you may want to try.....Boot from the WinXP CD, the Windows setup page has a selection titled "To Repair the Windows XP Installation Press R ", ... should restore the last made selections.

 

This fixed me up! Guess it wasn't really deleted, just lost the name.

Thanks though!

Russ