Windows 10 Access Denied - unable to gain administrator privileges

Skyfine said:

Yes I agree however unfortunately there is no installation USB or recovery drive.

Then you need to create one:
Create Bootable USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 10 Windows 10 Installation Upgrade Tutorials

It sounds like something is very corrupted on the hard drive and it is probably going to take a clean install to fix.

Skyfine said:

Yes I agree however unfortunately there is no installation USB or recovery drive.

You can do it without one. See the Tip in Option Four...

Tip
If you don't have a Windows 10 installation USB or recovery drive, then you can use OPTION SIX here to boot to Advanced Startup...

Which basically says: turn on, kill the power before it finishes booting. Repeat a few times until it boots into advanced repair mode. From there you can get to a command prompt.

Thanks for that Bree. I have not yet tried Option Six to get to the elevated command prompt. When I was working with the computer yesterday I did interrupt Start Up and use the Recovery options (which would not work) but none of them brought me to the screen in Option 6. That is probably because I did not turn it off and on a few times.

The computer is now en route to our tech guy, but if I can halt the process I will try Option 6.

Okay so turning the computer off and on worked and I was able to access the elevated command prompt. However after spending another couple of hours trying to take ownership, add a new user, check users and administrators through the command prompt, I am still not getting anywhere.

Skyfine said:

...after spending another couple of hours trying to take ownership, add a new user, check users and administrators through the command prompt, I am still not getting anywhere.

The usual approach is to use the command prompt to enable the built-in Administrator account as per Option Four. Then reboot and use that account to do the repairs.

I did that, however I had already enabled the built-in Administrator from the command prompt. So when I looked at the Binary value it had already been changed from 11 to 10. One thing I did notice is that the computer's name has changed to MINWINPC$. This is not the computer's original name. I am not sure how to change it back and whether this will help. My son's user account never appears in the local user group or administrator group. I keep adding him through the command prompt as administrator and it says it is successful, I then proceed to log on. Access is still denied to everything on the C: drive.