[Samba] Can't Join Domain "The User name cannot be found"

[Miguel Medalha]

Robert Steinmetz wrote:
> I have a small Samba installation, two servers and about 10 
> workstations. The hard drive on one of the Windows XP workstations 
> failed. I cloned a drive a from an identical machine and replaced the 
> defective drive.  When it came up it had the name of the original 
> machine (which was off). It worked fine.
>
> This group is small and fairly stable so I add machines to the domain 
> manually. The server uses tdbsam backend.
> On the repaired machine I changed the name of the machine to NEW and 
> set the Workgroup to WORKGROUP and rebooted.
> I deleted the original machine account using smbpasswd -x restarted 
> samba and recreated it using smbpasswd -a -m.
>

You cannot just clone a Windows workstation. You will have to change the 
SID (Security ID) of the clone. Otherwise, you end up with two machines 
with the same SID on the network, which is asking for trouble.

You will have to use some utility to change the SID of the new machine. 
If you use Ghost to clone your computers, you will then use Ghost Walker 
to change the SID. Microsoft includes a utility to clone a machine and 
change the SIDs on the clones.

The "sysprep" utility included in the Windows XP installation CD, under 
\SUPPORT\TOOLS, also takes care of cloning and subsequent changing of 
the SID.