Changed name of user folder and registry key, but now can't use that account.

I have two MS accounts, one user and one admin. One is mross after an email address, the other is Admin.

But the mross a/c is the actual admin user and Admin is a standard user. (This is because I initially installed Windows with just one local a/c called Admin and then decided to revert to my usual practice of running separate user and admin accounts.)

I made an error is creating them the wrong way round.

To fix this I changed the name of C:\users\admin to C:\users\marti and went to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList and found the right profile and edited the key ProfileImagePath to match.

After rebooting, when I try to log in to the modified account I get a message saying we can't log in to your account or something like that. If I dismiss the message I can access Windows but is wants to set up this account from fresh each time.

I was logged in as a proper administrator.

I have restored from a backup so I am sorted, I just wondered if there was a method that worked with an up-to-date version of Win 11 Pro 24H2. I know the method I used is risky but it worked a few months ago with only monor glitches which I was able to resolve.

You can undo changes you have made from WinRe by modifying registry hive offline.

In this video, i will explain in detail how to edit the Windows registry offline from a Windows Recovery Environment.

FreeBooter said:

You can undo changes you have made from WinRe by modifying registry hive offline.

In this video, i will explain in detail how to edit the Windows registry offline from a Windows Recovery Environment.

Click to expand...

Thanks but I have restored from an image backup so my system is ok now.

Well now you know how to edit registry offline.

Hello @kelper,

Usually, the method in the tutorial below works. The key is also doing step 14 to create a symbolic link for anything that may still want to reference the old profile folder name.