Make Microsoft Account a Local Account from the command line?

Question

I have an account that is a Microsoft Account at my office, but the person who used the computer has left, not telling anyone the password. In order to reset the password, I need it to be a local account. All I have is command line access from the Admin account. It's running Windows 8.

I cannot just delete the account, because we have to go through the files first to recover anything we need.

Alternatively, can I copy the files somehow to a new user and then access that account?

Solution

You will not be able to convert the account, but you can get the files from the command prompt.

As the administrator user use the takeown command to take ownership of the files that you need access to, copy the files off of the computer, wipe the system and create a new user that is not a Microsoft account so this does not happen again in the future.

Comments

[Ramhound]

You should be able to access the files by taking ownership of the user's profile folder using the default Administrator account.

[sinθ]

@Ramhound Can I create a new user account and copy the files to that somehow?

[sinθ]

Is there a difference between takeown and icacls

[Scott Chamberlain]

Yes, icacls changes the file permissions on the file to add or remove users to the file permission. takeown will change which user the CREATOR OWNER user points to. Either solution will usually work, however icacls requires that whatever user running the program has Change Permissions rights which could be removed for administrators if a user decided to do so. However you can not remove the Change Permissions rights for the Creator Owner user. So you may end up doing both, use takeown to take ownership then icacls to give your user permissions to read the files.