Admin Tips
- Windows Server 2008/2003/2000/XP/NT Administrator Knowledge Base
  - Windows XP
    - Admin Tips
      - TroubleShooting
        Troubleshooting Domain Join Issues

Section(s): Security , TroubleShooting , Network
Published on Jun 19, 2007.
Last Modified on Jun 19, 2007.
Last Modified by Mitch Tulloch.
Rated 3.3 out of 5 based on 3 votes.

How to troubleshoot when issues joining a domain arise.

If you’ve been trying to join a Windows machine to a domain and you’ve encountered problems (or you want to verify if everything went OK) you can do the following. First, try running netdiag /v to see if there were any error messages were generated from the procedure. If this doesn’t tell you anything, try running netdiag /debug next and see if any errors show up. Finally, if you do see errors, check the Netsetup.log file which is found in the \Windows\Debug folder on your machine. This file logs the various stages of the domain join process in detail and is fairly easy to interpret.

***

Mitch Tulloch was lead author for the Windows Vista Resource Kit from Microsoft Press, which is THE book for IT pros who want to deploy, maintain and support Windows Vista in mid- and large-sized network environments. For more information see www.mtit.com.

About Mitch Tulloch

Mitch Tulloch was lead author for the Windows Vista Resource Kit from Microsoft Press, which is the book for IT pros who want to deploy, maintain and support Windows Vista in mid- and large-sized network environments. Mitch was also the author of Introducing Windows Server 2008 and technical project lead for the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit, both books also from Microsoft Press. For more information on these and other books by Mitch, see www.mtit.com .