Win10 the user profile service failed the sign-in - No Other Account

A friend of mine who is profoundly dyslexic has asked me to fix their laptop.

It has the following error

"the user profile service failed the sign-in"

"User profile cannot be loaded"

So I have checked the other threads and tutorials as well as online, but all solutions assume you have another account to log into.

I had hoped that if I removed the NTUSER and associated files in the users profile it would replace them or roll back, so I booted a rescue CD and stuck the files in a temp folder and made a copy of them so I could swap individual files in and out till I got a working system.

At first this seemed positive, Windows tried to do a repair and asked me for the password of the user account, I entered the pin (which is all the owner has) but it required the password.

So I either need a way to make the password blank as you used to be able to do with 3rd party tools for standlone PC's or I need to find another way to fix this.

I have no access to the registry.

I thought of copying default profile from another system but I am concerned that will lose the user their settings, they are quite critical to them because of their disability.

I guess an option is to try to copy the default profile from another computer, see if I can get an admin user loaded, then create another admin user, then copy the corrupted profile files back to the original user account, then change their password, then move the files out again, then let windows try again.

My concern is that I may damage some of their settings in this process.

Just posting here in case anyone has any better ideas?

simrick said:

I just found this today, when dealing with the same problem on a computer earlier this evening. The fix is for W7, but it works on W10 as well.

I used Method #1 and it worked perfectly.

One note: You do NOT need the RefCount (step #5) at all.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...-error-message

.

Thanks for your help but that would not have worked as I did not have a login that worked thus could not run registry editor.

My goal here was to get the users saved passwords, then import them into another profile, so I could not risk anything that overwrote them, I did have a copy of the NTuser files and of the corrupted profile files.

I was unable to enable the hidden admin account as I could not run a CMD prompt as I had no account with which to login..

The corrupt account was linked to an online account but I could not use it's recovery method because the password of that account was not know, the users is dyslexic and has it entered for them by their browser.

So first I had to find a way to run a CMD prompt, the recovery partitions for this computer did not work, so I could not got there.

In the end I got a 3rd party boot disk for data recovery that was based on Windows CE, it had a command prompt so I was able to use that.

I was then able to to unhide the administrator account and reset the password (the user had a number and did not know the password nor could they write it because of their disability).

I tried creating a new profile based on the default profile but this lost the data so I rolled back to backup of NTuser, I did the registry options suggested above, but they did not stop the errors,

I eventually got back in but everything was black and it

I then created an Admin account and created a new Standard account for the user, then made a copy of the profile files for the new account and copied OVER the new profile with corrupt profile. After that I changed the permissions for all these files and folders, so that the Corrupt user account had full rights.

This got me back in but the profile was still pretty damaged.

I was able to load the browser but it seemed to know the profile was corrupt and offered to erase eveything and start over, I declined!

It would not let me export the passwords without the Windows or live.com email password. It would however let me login to the live.com account (filling in the password for me). I was then able to export the passwords and bookamarks, however, I was not going to need them.

The profile was a mess, it was all black on black a sort of high contrast mode for visually impaired despite this not being the setting for the user. I made a few changes but it was clear that the user would be better off with a new profile.

I then remembered that the the system was corruped by doing a system update. so I ran all the windows updates, including the Creators Edition. I knew this made changes to profiles and it did here too, effectively repairing the remaining parts of profile.

I think the biggest lesson from this is to make a backup of the NTuser fand associated files along with the profile files, then to apply the permissions to those files.

I hope this helps someone else.