Domain computer account deleted, trust relationship broken and local admi is disabled!

Question

My computer account was accidentally deleted from Active Directory, when I try to logon to my Windows 7 PC I get the message "the trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed" and I can't logon. In Windows 7 the local admin account is disabled by default, there is one other local account that is a standard user and doesn't have permission to disjoin the domain or enable the admin account.

I'm now in the position where I can't logon using my main PC and I can't disjoin the domain. Can I restore the trust relationship at the server end? I really don't want to resinstall!

Just to recap I can't logon to this PC as any user other than the standard local user who has no permissions to disjoin the domain or add/remove users. Is there anything I can do?

Many thanks to anyone who can help.

Steven

Answer 1

If you have logged on as a domain admin recently then you can pull out the network cable and log on with the cached credentials, then enable a local admin to unjoin/rejoin.

Answer 2

Use NT Offline to enable the local admin and blank out the password http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/
After you do that, just login as local admin and rejoin the domain

The only other option is to restore the computer account from backup. If you had BackupExec with the Active Directory add-on, this would be easy. If not, a system restore would do it but it'd be much riskier than just rejoining the computer to the domain after resetting the password.

Answer 3

Have you tried booting into safe mode? Usually, the administrator account doesn't require a password in that instance. To get into safe mode, hold in F8 until you get the boot menu, and select 'Safe Mode with Networking'