I have a dual boot laptop with Win8 + Ubuntu installed on 2 separate partitions. Yesterday, as a result of a series of tweaking and things I shouldn't have been doing, I'm facing the evil user profile service failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded error on Win8, hence being unable to login to my windows system.
Having Ubuntu as my guardian angel, I think creating a new user from the Linux system would be the easiest method to solve this problem. Any ideas on how to do this?
Notes (The question ends here, this is just extra notes for clarifying the situation and reasoning my solution):
1. I'm aware of this thread: Create a Windows XP user from a linux partition
But the solution posted for this one included changing the password, but what I'm facing won't get fixed by changing the password.
2. This solution includes a way to fix it through registry. However, running "regedit" using wine from Ubuntu, I checked the "Profilelist" key in registry. Noticed that there are no sub-keys at all. Either they were deleted, or they don't exist in Windows 8 (which is unlikely); which again, leads to my current solution: "Creating an entirely new user".
3. My windows 8 currently only loads into safe mode (sicne windows 8 doesn't provide the good old F8 escape key), and I used "chntpw" to enable the Administrator account, to which I still failed to login and received the same User Profile error.
4. net.exe encounters some serious errors while being run through wine.
Best Answer
If you can load to the log in screen, use Linux to rename the c:/windows/system32/sethc.exe file to c:/windows/system32/sethc2.exe, then rename cmd.exe to c:/windows/system32/sethc.exe.
when you get to the log on screen, press shift 5 times to engage stickykeys. instead of a sticky keys window, you'll get an administrator command prompt. from that, you can use the net user "" command to set up a new user account.