Quick Fix: Windows 7 unable to join domain…
March 23, 2011 1 Comment
I was looking at a clients laptop today, brand new Toshiba running Win 7 Pro.
I attempted to join it to the domain using the traditional, system properties / computer name tab method, but i was given a message that unfortunatley i didnt note down, but basically read…
Unable to join the domain, unable to start the service, service may be disabled..
Imediatley i thought of the netlogon service, and i went to the services.msc console and tried to start the netlogon service. It failed, with the message..
Could not start service, service may be disabled…
So, i thought, this is quite bad because the DNS Suffix of the machine has changed, and i dont want to reboot because i could be stuck half way through the join leaving the machine unstable, or worse it wont boot up or let me logon, and working on this remotley would make that a real pain!
So of course i tried again a few times, i then checked UAC settings which were not at the default, but i put them back to default anyway. No change.
I then decided to try and force it back into a workgroup to get out of any potential split issues, and that did succeed,
Welcome to the TEST workgroup!
I then tried to rejoin the domain, this time Success!
Wish i could put my finger on what went wrong, but laptop is now in the domain!
About Robert Pearman
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I think that I was getting this error because as I was migrating a large, hmm, “just a bunch of PCs” network to a Windows domain, I encountered multiple systems that shared the same name.