You need to sign in as administrator to continue

If you have encountered the error message You need to sign in as an administrator to continue, but there aren’t any administrator accounts on this PC, it’s probably why you have landed on this page. In this post, we will provide the most suitable solutions you can try to resolve this issue successfully.

You may encounter the issue whereby your Windows device fails to start and when you try to access Advanced Startup Options, you’re stuck on the error message screen even if you hard reboot your device. You may see this error when accessing Startup Repair, using System Restore or CMD, selecting an account in WinRe and so on.

You need to sign in as an administrator to continue, but there aren’t any administrator accounts on this PC

If you’re faced with this issue, try our recommended solutions below in the order presented below and see if any of the four methods help you resolve the issue.

Perform Automatic Startup Repair
Enable the inbuilt Administrator account
Create Administrator account
Perform an in-place upgrade repair.

Let’s take a look at the description of the process involved concerning each of the listed solutions.

1] Perform Automatic Startup Repair

Since you’re unable to access Advanced Startup options straight from your device, in this solution, you need to perform Automatic Startup Repair using the Windows 11/10 installation media.

Once the repair operation is completed, see if you can log in normally.

You can try the next solution if this fails to fix the issue.

2] Enable the inbuilt Administrator account

You can also enable the inbuilt administrator account using the Windows 11/10 installation media. Here’s how:

Boot your computer with the Windows 11/10 installation media.
When the Windows setup wizard shows up, simultaneously press the Shift + F10 keys on your keyboard.

This keyboard shortcut opens the Command Prompt before boot.

Now, in the CMD prompt, type the command below and hit Enter.

net user administrator /active:yes

This will enable the hidden administrator account. You can use it to log in.

3] Create Administrator account

Generally, to create a new admin account for Windows 11/10, you must first sign in to Windows 11/10 with an administrator or a regular user with administrative rights. However, occasionally, as in this case, you may not be able to sign in to Windows 11/10 for some reason – but don’t worry, you can bring up a Command Prompt from the sign-in screen, just with the help of a Windows 11/10 installation media. Here’s how:

Boot your computer from a Windows 11/10 installation media.
When the Windows Setup screen appears, press Shift + F10 to open a cmd.exe window.
Then run the following two command lines one after the other to replace the utilman.exe file with the cmd.exe file. Note: c is the system drive letter.

move c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe c:\

copy c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe

Now, run wpeutil reboot and disconnect the Windows 11/10 installation media to restart the computer.

With the installation disk disconnected, your computer will restart normally. When you reach the Windows sign-in screen, click the Ease of Access icon in the lower right corner of the screen. This will open a command prompt if the previous steps went right.

Now. you can create a new administrator account for Windows 11/10 by running the following two command lines one after the other. Replace user_name placeholder with the user name you want.

net user user_name /add

net localgroup administrators user_name /add

After a few seconds, the newly created administrator account will be displayed in the lower-left corner of the sign-in screen and you can use it to sign in to Windows 11/10.

Now, after you have successfully created the administrator account, you should restore the utilman.exe file. If not, you won’t be able to use the Utility Manager on Windows 11/10 sign-in screen and on the other hand, others might use the command prompt to change your Windows admin password or make other changes to your computer. To restore the utilman.exe file, do the following:

Boot your computer from the Windows installation media again.
When the Windows Setup screen appears, press Shift + F10 to open the command prompt.

Then type the command below and hit Enter.

move c:\utilman.exe c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe

When the prompt Overwrite c:\windows\system32\utilman.exe? appears on the screen, type Yes and hit Enter.
Remove the installation media and restart the computer.

TIP: Ease Of Access Replacer lets you replace Ease of Access button in Windows with useful tools.