Following a system restore on a Windows 7 workstation, I am getting the error message that "the trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed." I realize that the typical fix would be to login with a local admin account, leave, and then rejoin the domain. Here's the rub... I do not know the password for the local administrator. Any advice? Thanks.

Lost passwords are indeed a pain, however I found this utility to be very helpful, it is a linux based password reset utility. The prompts are easy to follow and everything works in no time! For the domain relationship error message, you have the right solution in mind however I will mention the following kb article for better understanding http://support.microsoft.com/kb/162797 Hope this helps, Shah

Hi, Regarding this is related the password information, you should refer to the following article to see what the suggestion is in this situation: What to do if you forget your Windows passwordAlex Zhao TechNet Community Support

Lost passwords are indeed a pain, however I found this utility to be very helpful, it is a linux based password reset utility. The prompts are easy to follow and everything works in no time! For the domain relationship error message, you have the right solution in mind however I will mention the following kb article for better understanding http://support.microsoft.com/kb/162797 Hope this helps, Shah That utility worked like a charm Shah. Thank you. Got me in as local admin, left and then rejoined the domain, and all is working well again! A little scary what that utility does and how easily it does it though. :-)

Glad it all worked for you :) regards, Shah

we've had this problem as well after certain windows automatic updates - the easy trick is to unplug the computer from the network then login as normal. Once logged in you can easily reset the local admin password to then rejoin the domain.

Thanks for this tip. I had the same issue with a VM Server. If I'd had this issue wih a Win 7 machine, my first instinct would of been to pull the network cable, but being a VM it only occurred to me to remove the network adaptor after reading your post. Now successfully logged in and reset the password Mark

Just had this happen to one of our machines again after doing a system restore to roll back a few days after the machine got a malware infection. Unjoin and rejoin worked fine. A hassle though!

I don't know if this is helpful to anyone but this happened to me when I moved a virtual machine to a different host! I guess the domain controller got clever and see's the VM as a completely different machine and therefore it has never been added to the domain!Ant0

"the trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed." in this error you found when your login time. Rejoining to the domain is the only one solution for to solve. This is happen in case of system restoration or after installing the windows updates. Once you rejoin you can retrieve the all files and same desktop (the same domain profile before you use).

This also happened to us recently, after restoring a crashed server. The workaround to the missing local administrator password was to boot the client into safe-mode WITHOUT networking and login as a domain administrator whose password is known. It seems that in safemode, the computer makes no attempts to contact the domain controller and you can reset the local admin password from the control panel just fine. Obviously this is a more niche solution. Our network is extremely small and our security is fairly light - copies of the passwords are cached locally just to prevent a headache should the server have a glitch. However, the local caching seems to be the default for domains so unless you know you've changed that, you may be able to reset your local admin and then leave/rejoin the domain this way.