Forum Discussion
Joining PC to domain breaks Windows
Hey all. We have a machine in our facility that is running Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 21H2, and for some reason whenever we try to add it to our domain, it breaks a few things. Windows Search no longer works, trying to run services.msc will accept the command but will take the box literally over 5 minutes just to open, takes other things longer to load than when not joined, sometimes it hangs up after rebooting when "applying computer settings" right before it logs in to where I have to unhook the network cable, etc. The first time we tried, we rebooted after joining domain and about 10 seconds into creating the new profile after it says "Hi", the entire screen went black. We waited and waited but nothing happened, so when we hit ctrl + alt + del, the screen came up, but if we hit task manager, it just goes black again and the cursor showed up. The only way I found around this was to ctrl + alt + del and log off, then log back in. After the first scare, we unjoined and waited until a later time when production was down. Second time seemed to yield the same results, but atleast that time we tried a few other things to see and it just wouldnt work. We unjoined and I started diving in a little more to see what I could do, and after googling and running through ChatGPT, it was finally determined to run an in-place repair install.
Well last night I deleted everything regarding it out of AD including the computer, user, and the GPOs created for it and started from scratch. Joined to the domain and it had the same issues but I pushed through and then started the install. Once I got through, all of the issues were still there AND now when I tried to open the software, it was having a "EtherCAT subsystem not started" error. Spent hours referencing it to a similar machine just to find out that during that in-place install, it must have lost its assignment to one of the NICs, Nonetheless I finally got that fixed, but I want to know if anyone here has ever seen that before and if you have any suggestions for a fix? Ive done like....10-15 other machines in the past 3-4 months that have not had this problem, all with a mixture of Windows 10 AND Windows 11. Any advice?