Windows 10: How to access local data saved under a closed MS account login on a Windows 11 machine

I have a laptop running Windows 11, which I bought from the company I used to work for. The only admin account on the laptop, which I was using as my login, was a Microsoft account that the company closed, and after the 60 day grace period the login ceased to work. So I set up another login with my own MS account, obtained a password from the previous owner to decrypt the C drive Bitlocker, and turned my account into an Admin. The work I had done under the previous login was all saved locally i.e. not using OneDrive. However, all the data saved since the MS account was closed is missing fr

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Cannot access my User Account on local machine but can access Admin account. Need help finding password but NOT reset it as it will delete saved data.

Hi,



I understand your concern and will assist you to resolve this issue.

If you reset the local account password it will not delete the Saved data.

I suggest you to back up the saved data and files from the admin account and try to reset the password and check if it helps.

Follow the steps below to reset the password.

• 
  Press Windows + R.
  
• 
  Type netplwiz and press enter.
  
• 
  Select the user account.
  
• 
  Click on Reset Password.
  

Hope this helps. If the issue remains unresolved, please get back to us and we would be happy to help.

 

Local Acct user and MS account user - sync them or merge them

If the local account is the one where you have most of your personal data, this is how I would do it:

• Sign in to your Microsoft account
  
• Copy all documents, pictures and other personal data from Microsoft account's user folders to corresponding folders in user Public (contents of MS account Documents folder to Public Documents folder and so on)
• Sign out from Microsoft account

Notice that above steps are only required if Microsoft account user folders contain data you want to keep. If its user folders are empty or do not contain anything worth saving, you can skip the above steps. Continue from below.

• Sign in to the local account
  
• Delete the Microsoft account (Option One in this tutorial)
• Switch your local account to a Microsoft account (tutorial)
• Copy the data backed up from old Microsoft account to Public folders to new Microsoft account in corresponding folders

That's it. Using the Public folders as temporary storage you will have none whatsoever file owner / permission issues later on.

 

Local Acct user and MS account user - sync them or merge them

Thank you. I will give it a try later today and post my results.

Got to it sooner than I thought.
Your method worked perfectly.

Thank you