How to Fix OOBELOCAL “Something Went Wrong” Error

Back in the late 90’s, a term became quite popular – “out of the box” which referred to the readiness of an electronics product to be used immediately after taking it out from its packing box. Microsoft incorporated this term in Windows XP (released in 2001) and came up with “out of the box experience” (OOBE) for the operating system setup process. It has stuck with Windows since then and is present even on Windows 11.

Actually, when I was installing Windows 11 on a brand new PC this week, it popped up in the middle of the setup process with an error message – “Something went wrong, but you can try again” OOBELOCAL. This flavor of OOBE is used for setting up local user accounts on Windows. If you use a customized Windows setup disk (with script to automate the process), then this error comes up sometimes.

OOBELOCAL Error

This error was also present with Windows 10 setup and now it is showing up again on Windows 11 installation. But how do we fix it? Here are some methods that have worked for me in the past:

1.  Click on the “Try again” button

When this error is displayed on the screen, you can also see a button “Try again” shown under the error. You can keep clicking on this button a few times if you can. Each time you click on this button, Windows setup will try to finish the process. If it shows this error again, try again. It just might work if you are lucky.

2. Create the account manually yourself

If the Windows Setup cannot finish the process, you have to take the matters in your hand and help it a little. When the error appears on your screen, press Shift+F10 to open a command prompt window. In this window give the following commands (assuming you are creating a local user account “Jessica”):

net user Jessica /add
net localgroup administrators Jessica /add
C:\Windows\system32\oobe\msoobe.exe

These commands will add a local user named “Jessica” and add it to the local administrators group. This account name should match the name used in the Windows setup process when it asks you for the local account.