William Labrecque
In the event where you are locked out of your SSMS admin account and cannot remember your password, follow these steps to give yourself Sysadmin rights to your current user account in SSMS.
To begin, you will need to open SSMS in single user mode.
Open your Windows Start menu and search for SQL Server Configuration Manager.
Once you open the configuration manager, click on SQL Server Services which will show SQL Server Services for all the instances along with SQL Server Agent services.
Select the SQL Server service of the instance that you want to start in single user mode. Right-click on the service and click on Properties as shown in the below image:
Navigate to the Startup Parameters tab. Type -m, click on Add and Click on the Apply button which adds the startup parameter -m to the startup parameters list of that SQL Server instance. Click on the OK button on the warning window.
Right-click on SQL Server service and click on the Restart to restart the SQL Server instance. SQL Server will start in single user mode.
You now have your SQL Server Management studio ready to open in single user mode.
Enabling your sysadmin rights on your current server user.
Open your SQL Server Management studio and disregard the error message.
Go onto the Logins folder inside of the Security folder and right click on your desired user.
If the user you want to use doesn’t appear on the list, simply right click on BUILTIN\Users
Go to the Server Role tab on the left side of the window, enable the sysadmin option in the bottom of the list and click OK.
You can now close everything and redo the first steps on enabling the Single user mode to remove the -m you added in the Startup Parameters tab and restart your SSMS in normal mode.