How do you leave audit mode without doing anything?

Today, I was messing around and entered audit mode on my laptop. I could not find a way to leave it without doing oobe.

Simply rebooting did not work as it automatically booted back to audit mode

So does anybody know how to leave audit so yo can just go back to normal mode?

Uh, what is/does audit mode?

Cheers

NavyLCDR said:

As far as I know, you have to run Windows\System32\Sysprep\Sysprep and reboot to OOBE.

There is also this, but I am not sure what the registry keys do:
How to exit audit mode in a simple step. - Microsoft Community



I've only done audit mode on clean installs, so sysprep has always been my way out.

Thanks but this is more or less all I could find.

That registry trick should not be used but it occasionally (not always) works if you are desperate and for some reason don't want to boot to OOBE.

However, the recommended way to exit Audit Mode is to boot to OOBE. It does no harm, I really have difficulties to understand why on earth another way to exit would be needed?

cereberus said:

I did not want to change anything at all and was concerned, it would wipe my user directories.

In the end, I decided to simply use Macrium Reflect Home to restore image I had made day before. With Rapid Delta Restore, it took 2 minutes 20 seconds!

Using sysprep.exe /oobe to exit Audit Mode keeps everything intact, it does not wipe any existing user profiles / data, nor does it remove any installed software.

Kari said:

Using sysprep.exe /oobe to exit Audit Mode keeps everything intact, it does not wipe any existing user profiles / data, nor does it remove any installed software.

As you know from the testing I did for you, I knew programs were kept etc, but was unsure about other user data. When you get to oobe stage, it wants to create an account - I was unsure what would happen if you use same details as an existing account.

Now I know existing user data is kept, then thinking about it, the obvious thing to do is just create a new local account, then you can login to previous account and delete the newly created account.

Thanks for info.

cereberus said:

I was unsure what would happen if you use same details as an existing account.

Now I know existing user data is kept, then thinking about it, the obvious thing to do is just create a new local account, then you can login to previous account and delete the newly created account.

Yes. OOBE requires you to create a new initial admin user. You cannot use a username already existing in system so you would need to create something I call a Dummy account.

Then when on desktop, sign out from Dummy, sign in to your old admin account and remove Dummy user.

Of course when testing on a Hyper-V VM I always create a checkpoint before booting to Audit Mode, to allow me to easily restore the state before Audit Mode.

Kari said:

Yes. OOBE requires you to create a new initial admin user. You cannot use a username already existing in system so you would need to create something I call a Dummy account.

Then when on desktop, sign out from Dummy, sign in to your old admin account and remove Dummy user.

Of course when testing on a Hyper-V VM I always create a checkpoint before booting to Audit Mode, to allow me to easily restore the state before Audit Mode.

Thanks - unfortunately I was using my host account at the time. I know what to do now - cheers.