Windows – How to run a program with admin privilege

Is there any particular reason you're trying to do this from the command-line as opposed to built-in features available in the UI? Also, might there be a system policy that's preventing you from performing these operations?

Here's a suggestion using the UI:

1. Open the Start Menu
2. In the Search Bar, type appwiz.cpl.
3. Wait for appwiz.cpl to appear in the search results. There should be only one entry at the top, under "Programs". It should have a document icon with some gears on it, and should be automatically highlighted.
4. With appwiz.cpl highlighted in the search results, press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER. This will force Windows to attempt executing appwiz.cpl with Administrator privileges.
5. Respond to any UAC prompts as appropriate.

If the above does not work, there may be an issue with your system's Security Policy. Do the following to check:

1. Log into the system under an account that has Administrator permissions.
2. Press Win+R.
3. Type secpol.msc and hit ENTER.
4. Respond to any UAC prompts as appropriate.
5. In the left pane, navigate the tree to the following location:

   Security Settings\Local Policies\Security Options

6. Find the "User Account Control" options, near the bottom of the list.
7. Check the setting User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for standard users
   • If it is set to Automatically deny elevation requests, you will not be able to use Administrator permissions while running under a standard user account.
   • If this is set to any of the Prompt for credentials... settings, and the above process for running appwiz.cpl elevated still does not work for you, then you may have a different problem.

Those instructions were wrong and have been fixed. Here's the usage for runas:

RUNAS USAGE:

RUNAS [ [/noprofile | /profile] [/env] [/savecred | /netonly] ]
        /user:<UserName> program

RUNAS [ [/noprofile | /profile] [/env] [/savecred] ]
        /smartcard [/user:<UserName>] program

RUNAS /trustlevel:<TrustLevel> program

Notice that in all three variations, you can specify only a program to be run, nothing else. They mean it: You cannot specify any arguments to the program as separate words. Any arguments must be embedded into the "program" string with surrounding quotes.

Also not made clear is that runas will not pass the current directories; it always starts in C:\Windows\System32. So any program you specify must either be in a PATH directory or given as a full path. You cannot use a relative path. And of course, any ACLs on that executable or the directories on its path must allow access by the user you'd like to run it as.

The good news is that runas will accept a .cmd file as a "program".

As a practical matter, what this means is that to do what you want, you'll probably want to create a .cmd file in a directory both users can access, then pass the full path. For example:

runas /u:Fred "C:\Users\Public\foo.cmd"

The final wrinkle is that runas can start a program as another user, but it can't elevate. There's no way to cause it to generate the UAC prompt. If you'd like to run something "as administrator" using runas, you'll have to enable the builtin Administrator account, which always runs elevated anyway, and specify that user name.

If that's not going to work for you and you need a generalized ability to pass arguments and/or current directories or if you need to run something elevated as something other than Administrator, you'll need a genuine su, like this one.