Especially with domain member laptops! When you run across this error upon logon, (“The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed.”), you’ll be very sorry if there’s no local administrator on the box. Keep in mind that Vista disables the administrator account by default. So if the only local account on the box is disabled or non-admin, you’re going to have some serious hacking to do! It might be possible to still log on as a cached domain admin by disconnecting from the network.
If you do have a local account, then it’s an easy fix. Just log on as the local admin, remove the computer from the domain, reboot and add it back to the domain.
Here’s the error message that the user will see:
What seems to be causing this, usually with laptops is that the end user always logs on to the laptop with cached credentials which may cause the machine’s domain account to eventually expire or get out of synch because it hasn’t been logging on to the domain.
November 11, 2008 at 10:17 pm
[...] logon prompt finally! Of course the computer’s password didn’t match the server, (see previous post), but with a local admin account, that was easily fixed by removing the computer from the domain [...]
February 9, 2009 at 3:01 am
i do have a local admin account but when i log on to the local machine it gives me the error (”The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed.”), i need to be sure in whether i can unjoin and rejoin back to the domain as im unable to rename the computer…please help on how can i be able to log on to the local machine
February 9, 2009 at 8:39 am
Make sure you’re logging on to the PC with the local administrator account. Then, once you’ve remove it from the domain, you’ll be able to rename it and then rejoin it to the domain as you normally would. Before rejoining the domain, delete the PC’s account from Active Directory on the domain controller.