The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed + Unknown local admin password
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.
February 7th, 2012 11:05am

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
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
February 8th, 2012 9:34pm

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. :-)
February 8th, 2012 9:41pm

Glad it all worked for you :) regards, Shah
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
February 9th, 2012 2:33pm

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
March 29th, 2012 9:23am

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
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
April 17th, 2012 5:17am

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!
April 17th, 2012 8:44am

"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).
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
May 26th, 2012 4:23am

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.
June 5th, 2012 12:17am

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.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
June 5th, 2012 12:17am

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 While this post helped the original asker, it is not really the solution to how to resolve the issue when one does not have access to a local admin acct. Proper answer is from mantis2k
July 13th, 2012 1:11pm

Rebooting in safe mode without networking let us log in with the domain account!! David Good to know! I had this happen to me again last week. Fortunately, this time I at least had the local admin account enableb. Still pretty irritating though!
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
August 3rd, 2012 10:14am

Rebooting in safe mode without networking let us log in with the domain account!! David
August 3rd, 2012 10:15pm

There is a warning when using this utility, that encrypted files may not be accessible after pw reset.
Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now
August 23rd, 2012 10:29am

This topic is archived. No further replies will be accepted.

Other recent topics Other recent topics