Solved Changing the local user login name on the login screen

[bobifle]

Hello nice people !

Windows is asking me for a password despite I've never had a password.

Here's what happened:

I've never had a password and choose during the win install to have 1 local account without password.

I used to have a user/login name with an non ascii character (é), and it was causing me some trouble. Hence I decided to change it with ascii only characters. Control Panel, users etc ... properties, changed the name of the local user.

Reboot, and boom, Windows asks me for a password and is displaying the former user name !! But there's no option to change the user name, I've read that there should be a back arrow but it's not here (probably because windows "thinks" there's no point since there is only 1 user).

I don't know what to do, I used a Linux live usb distro to use some tools that can reset password and unlock account, however:

1/ it can only reset password, which seems not to be the issue here, the issue is the wrong user name
2/ the linux tool shows 1 local user with the last update name

So I'm guessing windows is not using the proper name to login, but doesn't provide any mean to change it.

If anyone has an idea, that would be greatly approciated.

 

[Brink]

Hello Bob, and welcome to Eight Forums.

Double check in Netplwiz to do step 4 to set Windows to automatically sign in to your user account at startup. If you had this set before, then it may not have been updated after you removed your password, and needs to be setup again.

http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/2894-log-user-account-automatically-windows-8-startup.html

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[bobifle]

Thanks Brink,

Netplwiz was part of the solution, but I could'nt sign in windows anyway, so couldn't use it.

I think I hit a bug in the first place so the following fix may not necessarily make sense:

• From the login screen, select restart while holding the shift key, that will bring a menu allowing to start a command prompt as admin. From this prompt, I used the "net" command to make sure the administrator account was active. Close the prompt, you're back at the menu.
• Select advanced startup options, this will restart on another menu, allowing to boot in safe mode.
• In safe mode I can log as administrator, hit win+r, type netplwiz, create a new standard user (the name does not matter I won't use it), add it to the HomeGroup. Note that I could see my "broken" account bobifle in the list of users, and windows wouldn't allow me to use it
• restart, for some reason, windows allowed me to type the login and the password now, so I typed "bobifle", no password, and tada ... I got successfully logged as "bobifle" and my usual desktop pops up

Maybe some experienced user will make sense of this.
Again, trouble started as soon as I renamed my user account name from "Gérard" to "Bobfile". Windows must have some heuristic to detect stupid user names and make you pay for this.

 

[Brink]

I'm glad to hear you got it sorted, but not sure what may have caused that for you.