Windows 10: How do I show ownership of my dad’s account even though he passed away?

My dad passed away in 2021 and was able to access his Microsoft account then. However, I have since forgotten the password and the “forgot password” option has me trying to recover his account. I do not have enough information to recover the account. I’ve tried to call support but I can’t talk to a human because every time I say “account recovery” it just tells me to go online. What do I do?

:)

 

Remove account

I suggest you backup your personalized files first before removing the account.
To delete an account, follow these steps:

1. Press WIN + X keys and click Command Prompt (Admin) from the menu.
2. Type the following command and press Enter. Replace test with the name of your sister's account. Code:

 

Ownership Issues

that will not hurt taking ownership, but I would also then look in the list of users on the ownership page and make sure your user account name is there with full permissions. Probably not.

even though you take ownership of an item, you may not be in the list of users with permissions.

first select disable inheritance, then select "ADD" in the list of users, and add your user account the same way you took ownership and select full permissions.

Then administrators may only have select permissions in the list. so after you disable inheritance, delete admins user. then select add again and select admins in the list and select full permissions

restart pc

 

Take Ownership

Hello,

Thank you for posting your concern here in Microsoft Community and welcome to the Windows 10 Family.

From the description of the issue, I understand that you are unable to take full ownership of the files and folders.

I would recommend you to see if you are logged in administrator account, if not then enable it. Please follow the below steps.

I would suggest you to enable the built in administrator account.

You need to run the command from an elevated command prompt. To do that you need to do the following:

• Press the Windows key t+ R from the keyboard to open the Run Command Dialog Box
• Enter cmd and right-click on the Command Prompt result that should appear.
  
• This opens a list of options at the bottom. Select Run as administrator there.
  
• Accept the UAC prompt
• Enter the following command to enable the hidden administrator account:
  net user administrator /active:yes

Hope the above information was helpful. If you need further assistance, please do let us know and we would be happy to help you further.

Thank You.