How can I reconnect a domain user account to an older account folder?

Question

One of our older domain accounts got deleted (ugh), and after I recreated it yesterday, the client computer created a new account on the PC, even though I recreated the domain account exactly as it was.

I now have domain_account.001. Also because of this, 50+ some scheduled tasks are broken, and won't even allow editing - comes up with a windows error.

I did a system restore which seemed to fix it, but as soon as I restarted the computer and signed in again - boom - new account creation again.

Is there any way I can fix this?

Answer 1

If you really did "recreate" the account by creating an account with the same name, rather than restore the tombstoned AD object, I recommend that you try to restore the account from AD. A likely cause of your problem is that Windows doesn't use account usernames when identifying user accounts - it uses the account's SID. A newly created account will have a different SID so will be treated differently. That is why Windows doesn't want to give that account access to the original user's home folder etc.

There are lots of details on how to restore AD objects here:

http://www.petri.co.il/recovering-deleted-items-active-directory.htm

I would go for ADRestore.net for simplicity's sake.

When you've got rid of your "recreated" account and restored the original, delete the domain_account.001 directory and log on to the PC with the restored domain account.