Pulling my freakin' hair out.

Okay, got one of the weirdest issues I have personally dealt with. Hope you guys/girls can help me out. Running an NT 4 Domain, one of the workstations which is a docked Dell Laptop with NT4 (I think SP3, might have to go back on site and re-check that.) Anyway, I recently had to rebuild the domain. I have removed and re-added this laptop to the domain twice. But the problem still persists. The only account that can log onto the domain from this laptop is the Admin account. Logs in no problem at all. But, if the user tries with their account, it says that the domain controller can not be contacted. But, get this, ALL network resources are still available. I checked to see if the account was corrupt by logging it on at various other workstations, no problems. Replaced the patch cable from the machine to the wall jack, no change. What the f@#!k? Can anybody think of anything I have missed? Thanks a million.

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Life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you react to it.

I get this error all the time - I would love to find out why.

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Death is lighter than a feather - duty heavier than a mountian.

Do you get this error with machines running SP 6a? And, do you still have access to all the network resources after acknowledging the eeror?

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Life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you react to it.

I get the error running SP5 and SP6a, also the error goes away after one or two succesful boots, and I have access to all network rescources.

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Death is lighter than a feather - duty heavier than a mountian.

You said the laptop was Service Pack 3, what about the PDC?

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Soylent Green is People!!!! Its made of People!!!!!

The PDC has SP6a on it. I have just inherited this network, and his has a long way to come. I built a new PDC, its good, everything else is pretty much sub standard at this point.

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Life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you react to it.

I would try the following :

1. Removing computer from domain

2. Removing all users and profiles from laptop

3. new SID Http://www.sysinternals.com

4. Create New Computer account and add workstation to domain.


Hope you find it useful



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Computers do exactly what you tell them to do - not exactly what you want them to do ...

I would switch the dell NT Workstation to workgroup temporarily. Then I would delete the entry in server manager on the NT Server. Shutdown the Dell, Reboot the server, start the Dell, Join the domain (switch to domain, enter admin name and password, welcome to the ???? domain). I've seen similiar problems with machines on networks with both NT and Novell servers on the same network. The problem is the NT Server and Workstation are in conflict of who is in charge. The workstation is looking for the old server SID. The Server thinks it is a security problem. Removing from the domain and re-connecting fixes it.

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What's the differance between 'twisted' and 'torqued' anyways?

Right, I thought removing from the domain and reconnecting would fix it too, but like I said, I have already done that twice. Yes, I booted it up in workgroup, and deleted the machines account in Server Manager. I even went as far as renaming the machine before I joined it back to the domain.

Remember, your global groups from the old domain won't have the same SIDs as the new one, so check out hte perms on the C: drive of the laptop. If it is just a simple case of Admin/Users your cool, but if you see "Unknown Account" that could be the source of your troubles. If this is the case, if you are ever changing PDCs, create a BCD first, so you can keep the old domain (and therefore old groups) going on your new server.

Hope this helps!!!

SP3?! Get rid of that virus MS wrote and put on at least SP4. After that make sure that the user has an account on the Domain, and a different account(different name) on the local machine. NT4 has been know to still log them(no domain controller found) into the local machine even if you specify the domain.

are you useing DCHP,WINS or DNS. if your using DCHP does your laptop get an ip address from the server, if you got wins can you map to if from another pc, i would deffintly upgrade on your service pack this could fix alot of your problems, do you have your network settings configure correctly? how mant other pc are on your network how many servers? do u have any 2000 servers? could your laptop be trying to authinticate to another sever?

Brotha, the server crashed, gone, see ya. Believe me, if createing a BDC had been an option, I am competent enough that I would have done so. But when you can't get the PDC to power up at all, you can't really add a BDC. That was the first thing I identified when I came on site. The customer now knows that a BDC is a necessity.

I plan on updating the SP's ASAP, believe me, but that is what I inherited to start with. I am using DHCP there, and sometimes it will grab an IP, sometimes not. It does so much wacky intermitent s**t that it is mind boggling.

Anyway, thanks for the help you guys.

From the Domain Manager Select the Profile as a Temp Account and active only when connected This sould slove your problem.

If you are using TCP/IP, and have made up a new network using the same addressing from the old network, sometimes the old address will "stick" on the client machine, causing it not to be allocated the address that the new domain controller wants it to have...

From an MS-DOS command prompt, type IPCONFIG...

this will show you what addressesing your machine is currently using...

by typing the command RELEASE ALL, you will free up your machine of all TCP/IP addresses. Upon reboot, your machine should take the new address assigned to it in it's network control panel TCP/IP properties, and should work properly with the new domain controller...

Good Luck

Thanks Equivox, but I use IPCONFIG in my sleep. That, of course, was the first step in the troubleshooting process, after making sure it was plugged in and turned on. This is a profile issue.

Could it be a local machine policy problem? Check if the machine has been profiled so that only Admins can log on from it. A thought.
Good luck