This perhaps isn’t the best time of the year to be posting about trust relationship breakdowns, but this is the only post I have ready to go (I have a couple of series of posts I intend to do soon).
I make quite a lot of use of virtual machines for testing and writing because of the flexibility and ease of taking a snapshot before doing something risky so the machine can be reset. After doing so one day, I ran into a problem I hadn’t seen before after restoring one virtual machine to a snapshot:
The machine was part of the DOMAIN.azurecurve.co.uk which will be what the trust relationship had failed against. I switched user and tried to log in using a local user account:
As long as you can log into the virtual machine as a local user then the problem is easily fixable. Go into System (
), click Change settings and then click Change…. Change Member of to Workgroup and click OK:
You’ll be reminded that now the machine has been removed from the Domain, the local adminstrator account’s password will be needed. Click OK to confirm and proceed:

Click OK to the Welcome to the WORKGROUP workgroup message:

Confirm the restart message:

Restart the machine and re-open the Computer Name/Domain Changes window and change the Member of back to your Domain:

Enter a Domain username and associated password and click OK:

Click OK to the Welcome to the domain message:

Confirm the restart message:

Click Restart Now to restart the virtual machine:

Once the virtual machine has restarted, will be able to log in as a Domain user again.
I did some investigation and this seemed to be the best/easiest way of resolving the issue. However, if someone knows a better/more efficient way than removing the VM from the domain and adding it back I’d appreciate hearing about it in the comments.
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