by Rich Rousseau
1. February 2007 08:34
I use virtual envionrments fairly regularly at work. I mainly use them for app debugging in a clean environment, permissions testing, and automated deployment testing.
I have a Virtual PC 2004 setup with my base OS installed on it's own virtual hard drive. I create a new differencing vhd on top of that when I need a fresh environment to work in. This has worked very well for me until today.
I created a new differencing vhd and booted into it. Everything was fine until I tried to login. I received the following message box...
Windows cannot connect to the domain, either because the domain controller is down or otherwise unavailable, or because your computer account was not found. Please try again later.
At first I thought that my domain wouldn't let me logon because I had a bunch of updates to install. After letting the vm run for 20 minutes I restarted it, installing all the updates it downloaded. (On a side note, I didn't know windows would download updates even when you're not logged in.). Even after that, no luck.
Google to the rescue...An old newsgroup post hinted that it might be because my (virtual) computer already existed on the domain. The solution, login as the local admin, take the computer off the domain and put it back on. Success!
I'm posting this in hopes the answer will be more accessible to future generations of googlers.
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