Every once in a while an older workstation or server will lose its trust relationship with the Windows Domain. I experienced this “lost of trust” issue recently when I had to roll back a virtual server instance of  Windows Server 2008r2 to a snapshot that was quite dated.

The error message was similar to: “The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed.”

A quick Google search seems to turn up the popular solution of re-joining the domain which requires rebooting the server/workstation. This does work.

However, if you are in a rush (and you are able to log into the server/workstation with a local account) give the following command a try using the command prompt:

netdom.exe resetpwd /s:DomainServer /ud:YourDomain\Administrator /pd:*

 

Of course, substitute “DomainServer” with one of your actual domain servers and substitute “YourDomain” with the name of your domain.

“netdom.exe” is probably already installed if you need to try this little trick on an older version of Windows Server. On older versions of Windows (workstation) OS, for instance version 7, you may have to install the Remote Server Administration Tools which you can find at this link in order to get this utility installed.