[Stupidity] re-enable a disabled local administrator account in Windows
I was stuck when I was setting up a Windows server 2003 machine this afternoon. After I loaded pretty everything on the machine, I created another user account named support and disabled local administrator account, and log off. Ooops, did you see anything missing here?
Yes, I forgot to add the support account to the local administrators user group. So basically, I was screwed, and was stuck in a user account that has limited privilege to the machine because everything I tried just plainly gave me “access denied” popup.
Without any luck fooling around in the system, I headed over to ServerFault for help. Before I threw in a question that would make me look bad, I did a search hoping someone who already had the same venture. Sure enough, the answer that was voted as the best answer to this question has the solution that rescued me from the air. Tip my hat to Erik P. Skaalerud.
Simple enough, all I needed to do was to boot the machine up in safe mode, log in as local administrator, and add my user account support to the local administrators group. Done!
Another lesson learned with almost one hour of my life wasted. 
Like this post? Why don't you consider following me on Twitter and subscribing to my feed?
