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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T17:33:22+00:00

Just installed SQL Server Management Studio with Tools including LocalDB. Went through entire setup

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Just installed SQL Server Management Studio with Tools including LocalDB. Went through entire setup without ever seeing an option to set the sa password nor setup any other users/logins with sysadmin rights. So now I can’t actually do anything in SSMS. Permission is denied to create new database, change the sa password, etc. Pretty useless until I can either log in as sa or setup my user with sysadmin rights. What am I missing here?

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  1. Editorial Team

    During setup you should have seen a screen that offered you to choose mixed authentication for the database engine and also add Windows users to the sysadmin server role. Here’s what it looked like:

    enter image description here

    Chances are you blew past it clicking Next > Next > Next. It’s ok, we’ve all done that.

    The easiest fix, I think, is to connect using SSMS via PSExec.exe. This will allow you to connect as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM, which has inherent sysadmin rights to SQL Server. You launch it with these options:

    PsExec -s -i "C:\...path to ssms...\Ssms.exe"

    This will run SSMS as NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM using Windows Auth. You will be prompted to connect to a server, just enter .\SQLEXPRESS (make sure the service is running):

    enter image description here

    Then you can right-click your instance and change the authentication mode to mixed (Properties > Security), reset the sa password under Security > Logins, and add your Windows login as a sysadmin.

    You can also see this answer if that doesn’t get you everything:

    https://stackoverflow.com/a/12164306/61305

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