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. No worries; you’re in good hands! In this post, we will provide the most suitable solutions you can try to successfully resolve this issue.

You may encounter the issue whereby your Windows 10 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 need to sign in as an administrator to continue

If you’re faced with this issue, you can try our recommended solutions below in the order presented below and see if that helps to resolve the issue.

1. Perform Automatic Startup Repair
2. Enable the inbuilt Administrator account
3. Create Administrator account
4. 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 10 installation media.

If this fails to fix the issue, you can try the next solution.

2] Enable the inbuilt Administrator account

Here also, you can enable the inbuilt administrator account using the Windows 10 installation media. Here’s how:

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

This keyboard shortcut opens Command Prompt before boot.

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

net user administrator /active:yes

3] Create Administrator account

Generally, to create a new admin account for Windows 10, you must first sign in to Windows 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 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 10 installation media. Here’s how:

• Boot your computer from a Windows 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:windowssystem32utilman.exe c:

copy c:windowssystem32cmd.exe c:windowssystem32utilman.exe

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

With the installation disk disconnected, your computer will restart normally. When you reach the Windows 10 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 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 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 10 sign-in screen and on the other hand, others might use the command prompt to change your Windows 10 admin password or make other changes to your computer. To restore the utilman.exe file, do the following:

• Boot your computer from the Windows 10 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:windowssystem32utilman.exe

• When the prompt Overwrite c:windowssystem32utilman.exe? appears on the screen, type Yes and hit Enter.
• Remove the installation media and restart the computer.

4] Perform an in-place upgrade repair

This solution requires you to perform an in-place upgrade repair and see if that helps.

Hope this helps!