How to Fix “We Can’t Sign in to Your Account” on Windows

Windows doesn’t let you sign-in? You can’t access your personal files and all the settings were reset?

You got a “blue” window telling you that “We can’t sign into your account”…

… and wonder what went wrong the last time you shutdown your PC?

There is a big chance that this error showed up after a recent update Windows Update made.

This error shows up after the boot up phase finish, whatever changes you make to your account won’t be saved because Windows is using a temporary Desktop since he can’t login to your original user account.

There are other causes to this kind of errors, it can be a virus that messed up your profile files, registry failure or corrupted files or even a malware.

To be frank this error is not clear for it doesn’t give any error code to find the specific cause of such error.

In this tutorial you will learn how to fix “We can’t sign into your account” error using different methods, all tested!

Fix Guide: “We Can’t Sign Into Your Account”

The error “We can’t sign into your account” shows in the form of a window that invites you to Sign out or Dismiss.

If you Sign out and Sign in back again you will repeat the same cycle.

If you Dismiss all changes made in the current session won’t be permanent, so don’t use your computer if this error shows up in the first place. Try to fix it first.

0. Recover Your Files FIRST!

Before you follow the steps on this tutorial copy all the files of your user account in the folder C:\Users\Your-Username\ to a safe place (e.g External Drive, USB Flash, …) because you may lose all of them if you make a mistake.

1. Registry Fix for “We Can’t Sign Into Your Account”

Click on “Dismiss” in the window of the error and open the Run command prompt using the Win+R combination. Type in cmd and hit “OK“. You can also open the command prompt using Win+X then A.

Use this command to get the SID of the user account you want to recover. Replace ‘user’ by the username (here ‘soufiane’) of the account in C:\users\.

wmic useraccount where name='user' get sid

You will get the serial number of your profile account, keep the window open and let’s find where that key is.

Open a new Run window using the Win+R combination key. Type regedit and click “OK“.

Follow this path clicking on the arrows on the left side of the Registry Editor.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

You will find under the “ProfileList” key the SID we found earlier using the Command prompt.

Select your profile SID and find “ProfileImagePath” in the right-side of the Registry Editor. Double-click on it to edit the value.

Replace the temporary path with your User account path, make sure you backup your personal account files to a safe place before you restart your computer. Click “OK” to save.

Make sure you set “RefCount” and “State” values to “0“.

Close everything and restart your computer.

Run Windows Updates

Open “Start” and go to “Settings” app, click on “Update & security“.

Choose “Check for Updates” and let the system scan for any available updates to download and install.

Wait until all the updates are installed and restart your computer.

2. Restore Your System

You can try to perform a System Recovery by going to “Control Panel” (CTRL+X & P) and select “Recovery“.

Then click on “Open System Restore“.

Next steps are simple, after the recovery is finished you will most likely get your account back again, you may lose some files in the process. This is why it’s recommended to copy them to a safe place and restore them after your Account & Settings are recovered.

You can also try do a System Restore using the Troubleshooting tool. Hold on SHIFT key and go to “Start” > “Restart“, you will get a “Please wait…” message. This will enable you to access the Troubleshoot blue screen.

Click on “Troubleshoot“.

Choose “Advanced options“.

Now you can do lot of things, what we want is “System Restore“. We will cover other features in the other methods and other tutorials on easytutorial.com.

Choose your account in the list and type your password. Click Continue.

After a couple seconds a window called “System Restore” will show up, click “Next >“.

Because I’m using this tutorial on a fresh Windows Installation I don’t have many restore points, choose the nearest Date and Time to present and click “Next >“.

Click “Finish” and wait until the process finish, your machine will reboot. You should get a working Windows with all your personal account’ settings back at the Date and Time of restore point.

The files and folders are not lost during a System Restore which is really useful but we recommend that you do the necessary by backing-up all the user’ files into a safe place before you do any work.

3. Use Safe Mode with Command Prompt

We will use the command prompt to recover your account, this is tricky since we will need to run the commands on Safe Mode.

You can start your computer on Safe Mode by holding SHIFT and restarting your Windows. Then choose “Troubleshoot” > “Advanced options“.

In the Advanced options screen choose “Startup Settings“.

The Startup Settings will allow you to enable Safe Mode including other type of boot options we used to have in the old BIOS (remember the F8 key?).

Click “Restart” to reboot in the Startup Settings.

Press 6 or F6 to enable the Safe Mode with Command Prompt.

After the startup you will get a low-resolution desktop, open the command prompt using CMD in Run (Win+R).

Then type the following commands one after the other (hit ENTER after you type each line of command), don’t forget to replace ‘useraccountname’ with a Username of your own.

net user /add useraccountname mypassword

net localgroup administrators useraccountname /add

net share concfg*C:\\/grant:useraccountname,full

net user useraccountname

4. ReProfiler, Best Tool to Re-Assign the Folders

ReProfiler is a free tool that is Windows 10 compatible and allows you reassign user profiles that were detached from their accounts. It’s easy & recommended if you got the “We can’t sign into your account” error because of the detachment of your account and folder.

After your download the program ReProfiler install it.

On the main interface all you have to do is select both the “User Account” from “User Accounts” list and the profile from “Profile Folders“. Then click “Assign” and do a reboot. Bingo!

5. Reset Your Computer

If you think it’s time to start with a fresh Windows installation, do a backup to your files on an external drive and restart holding SHIFT key to launch the blue screen of troubleshooting.

Click “Reset this PC“.

Now you can keep your files if you didn’t perform a backup or you can remove everything because you saved your files in an external drive.

Click “Only the drive where Windows is installed” if you have multiple drives.

Then click “Reset” to start the reset process, the computer will likely reboot two times during the process.

There you have it! I hope this tutorial helped you fix the error and got your Windows running again, please don’t forget that Sharing is Caring, thanks a lot for your time.

If you have any questions feel free to post a comment down below.