Windows 7 won't boot on one of our user's laptops. It's Windows 7 Enterprise, and it's joined to our domain. After an automatic windows update, the laptop stopped booting, seemingly due to a driver change, or a change to something in the OS that Windows Update applied. The hard drive seems to work fine though, we can see everything when we go into System Recovery, but none of the repair or recovery options work. Restoring from restore points doesn't work either (stupid feature if it doesn't work).
We want to try just reinstalling win7 from scratch, and then transfering the Machine SID from the broken install to the new one so we don't have to rejoin the machine to the domain. Is this possible? Is there a tool that can read the SID(s) from the non-working image/drive, and then set the SID(s) on the new drive/image to the same values? And assuming we kept the machine name the same along with this, would we be able to successfully boot that new W7 install and have it be on our company domain?
I understand that there is something called a "Machine SID", unique to each windows install, and that this machine SID is what the domain uses to recognize each PC. If this SID changes then you need to re-join to the domain. You also cannot have multiple machines on the network with the same Machine SID at the same time. Are there any other SID's besides this machine SID that we have to worry about in this scenario?
In theory we can ask the IT team to rejoin to the domain but there are some company issues going on right now and our IT team is not handling any new non-critical requests right now, and not for the foreseable future. Otherwise we wouldn't even be troubleshooting the laptop's window's install ourselves (we are developers, not IT).
We want to try just reinstalling win7 from scratch, and then transfering the Machine SID from the broken install to the new one so we don't have to rejoin the machine to the domain. Is this possible? Is there a tool that can read the SID(s) from the non-working image/drive, and then set the SID(s) on the new drive/image to the same values? And assuming we kept the machine name the same along with this, would we be able to successfully boot that new W7 install and have it be on our company domain?
I understand that there is something called a "Machine SID", unique to each windows install, and that this machine SID is what the domain uses to recognize each PC. If this SID changes then you need to re-join to the domain. You also cannot have multiple machines on the network with the same Machine SID at the same time. Are there any other SID's besides this machine SID that we have to worry about in this scenario?
In theory we can ask the IT team to rejoin to the domain but there are some company issues going on right now and our IT team is not handling any new non-critical requests right now, and not for the foreseable future. Otherwise we wouldn't even be troubleshooting the laptop's window's install ourselves (we are developers, not IT).
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