Admin locked out

[mrich]

Hello, I have a serious problem.
I was tinkering with some security policies and locked myself , the
administrator as well as the other users out of my laptop. No one can open
any program including notepad, explorer etc......
I have a home network and tried to at least access the laptop to backup
files but I still cannot access anything. I can only log onto the laptp
local and thru the network but cannot gain any access to files.
Any and all suggestions will be greatly appreciated as usual.

 

[Steven L Umbach]

What exactly were you tinkering with? Security options, user rights, NTFS
permissions?? You can always access your files and modify NTFS permissions
of default operating system users/groups by doing a parallel install of the
operating system, placing the hard drive from your laptop in another
computer as a secondary/slave drive [with the proper adapter], or booting
from a cdrom such as Bart's PE though will not be able to access any files
encrypted via EFS that way unless you have exported your EFS private key to
a password protected .pfx file ahead of time. Also see if you can use
psexec from SysInternals to remotely gain access to the command prompt on
the locked out computer which will increase your chances of fixing things.
If the problem is only NTFS permissions you may be able to fix that remotely
and you may have to take ownership of folders first as administrator and
remove deny permissions for groups that may be locking you out.
Administrators are also members of users, authenticated users, and everyone
groups.--- Steve

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PsExec.html -- Psexec.
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ -- how to create a Bart's PE bootable cdrom