How to unlink Microsoft account without being logged-in? (lemmy.blackeco.com)

submitted 1 day ago by BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com to c/techsupport@lemmy.world

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Hello,

Last week-end, someone came to me with a peculiar issue: their Windows account was linked to a Microsoft account that somehow no longer exists, preventing them from logging in. From then, the solution appeared simple: transform the account into a local one.

Unfortunately, all the resources I found online presumes that you are logged into the account you want to unlink, which wasn't possible. And unfortunately, you can't unlink said account from an Administrator account either.

Since the computer was brand new and barely touched, I ended up enabling the Administrator account, creating a new local account and deleting the problematic account.

My question is: if the situation was to happen again, but I cannot delete spare to lose data on the locked account, what should I do?

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[-] DomeGuy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Depends on the data you want to save, and how friendly the apps that put it there are to the data being moved.

Assuming the data is all file-based and well behaved, and you're an administrator on the local PC the steps would be something like:

Create the new local account and sign in once.
Sign out new account and in as admin.
Take a copy of the new account's folder in C:\Users
Replace that folder's contents with (a copy of) the old account's contents.
Drop the new folder's data over the old, replacing any conflicts.
Replace the permission for all contents of the new folder.

And, of course:

*Implement a real backup plan for any actually important files. Cloud service folders are ONE copy, and don't count as backups of themselves.

this post was submitted on 19 May 2026

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