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The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain controller failed.

We have a Windows 2003 Standard domain controller which is going to be replaced in a few weeks when we have an outage window. Over the past week we have had issues with several workstations displaying the messages the the trust relationship between the workstation and the primary domain controller has failed.

In a few instances we've had the user shut down their workstation, pull the power and network cables for a few seconds and then boot and log in - usually no problem. There have been a few users where the resolution isn't that easy - in fact we've had to remove the workstation from Active Directory and re-join.

This issue is repeating itself on some of the problem workstations. I have also tried resetting the workstation account and rebooting the workstation, but that hasn't helped.

Has anybody run into this issue and if so is there a solution that will prevent this issue from re-occurring?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Will Szymkowski

How is your overall DC health? Run the following commands...
repadmin /replsum
repadmin /showrepl
repadmin /bridgeheads
DCDiag /v

Also, when you encounter this issue can you run the following command from the domain controller.

netdom verify <computername> /Domain:domain.com /UserO:administrator /PasswordO:*

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When you run that command press enter and type in the password to whatever account you are using. This command will check and make sure that the computer account has in fact lost its trust with the domain.

Another thing, I see this type of issue a lot when workstations or servers are not properly syspreped and added to the domain. Properly syspreping machines is critical and if not done properly can create these kind of issues.

Also checking the logs on the workstation as well would be a good indicator of what is going on.

Will.

WORKS2011

I would check the computer anti-virus or 3rd party anti-virus / malware software.

I saw this on one computer in a SBS2008 domain and it happened twice. I found it interesting that the same computer only encountered this issue. Looking into it further the user installed a 3rd party app which caused the issue. It was something like Malwarebytes but different (can't recall the name) it made a change to the firewall in the registry which caused the issue. After removing the 3rd part app it never happened again.

Poly11

ASKER

Thanks for the replies. Netdom is not installed with Windows Server 2003 (at least what I am reading).

The affected workstation did have Malwarebytes installed. I did remove it and reboot, however still getting the same error. The affected workstation is running Windows 8.1 Pro.

Thanks

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WORKS2011

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compdigit44

Are all the workstations having the problem running Windows 8? Also have you checked DNS to see if the workstation have multiple DNS records listed.

Poly11

ASKER

We removed the problem workstations from the domain and changed their names, but the problem happened again. After we disabled IPV6 and repeated the process the problem hasn't come back. Thank you!