Windows Remote Desktop Troubleshooting Help

[maplepants]

Hello windows experts,

 

I need some help with trouble shooting steps for Windows Remote Desktop. Got myself a new boot drive on my gaming PC, install W10 Pro fresh and am now trying to activate remote desktop.

I've checked the box in Settings to activate Remote Desktop (as described here) and added my user to the group of users allowed to access the PC. However, I get a "username/password wrong" error whenever I try to log in from my Mac using the official RDP client.

 

If this were macOS or Linux, I know exactly which logs to check but for Windows I have no clue. I went to the log file mentioned here but nothing obvious stood out. I'm not sure where I'm looking in the wrong place, or just missing some important info. I'm very used to have grep and sed to help me parse logs and I'm missing them a lot right now.

 

So here's my some basic info about my setup and I'm hoping someone can say "go to the log $here, and there you'll find the error message/number you need to google".

 

I've tried with PCNAME\maplepants / $localaccountpw and with my Microsoft account. Neither work.

 

Account setup: Initially setup as a local account, then converted to Microsoft account (I read somewhere that this is the "correct" way to set stuff up)

Users who can access remote desktop: Me specifically, admin users generally

Windows version: W10 Pro

Network: I can ping the PC from other devices, and I'm able to log into the Mac from the Win PC.

 

I can add any info you need.

[maplepants]

I found the solution to my problem here! Since I've gotten many good solutions from this forum's search function I'm adding the solution here for anyone who finds this thread via search.

 

So the key issue was with Remote Desktop for a Microsoft Account.

 

When I first setup my PC I didn't put in my password, instead I used the Microsoft Authenticator App and setup a PIN straight away. Based on this Microsoft forums thread it looks like that resulted in the PC not having a hash for my password.

 

So in order to sync my Microsoft Account details fully to the PC, I turned off my PIN and then ran the below command into Powershell/Windows Terminal

 

runas /u:MicrosoftAccount\[my account email] cmd.exe

Once this was done, cmd.exe popped up. I could re-enable my PIN and the remote desktop worked perfectly.

 

I also ran into this problem on my brand new Windows 11 install, so whatever bug causes this on W10 hasn't been fixed yet.

 

So the step summary is:

 

1. Disable PIN / Windows Hello
2. runas /u:MicrosoftAccount\[my account email] cmd.exe
3. Re-enable PIN / Windows Hello
4. Enjoy remote desktop

Hopefully this helps someone.