I've had two well qualified network admins give me opposite directions on this, and I'm hoping to get at the nitty ggritty and find out the correct answer. We are using Windows 2003 servers (Active Directory). I had the hard drive in an XP Pro workstation crash without a backup. I put in a new disk, used our standard image to configure the OS which sets the computer up on a workgroup, then joined the domain using the computer name/account the machine had previously. One of the Admin's told me this was hunky dory. The other admin told me that it will cause all sorts of troubles if I don't remove the old computer name from A.D. first, then create it fresh for the machine. So which one is correct, and why?

You won't be able to join domain with same name if you haven't delete the old name first. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

You can. At least it worked for me. I just don't know if there will be other headaches to come. The admin that said I could do it said as long as I'm using the same network card it should work. That doesn't make sense since I didn't think the MAC address was associated to the SID/GUID (I always get those confused). Nonetheless it worked. That was a week ago and nothing has crashed yet.

@Narnian This forum is for Exchange server and and not AD. Please post in the AD forum. In short, the answer to your question is, no, there will be no issues if you the same name. Sukh

Of course you can. The only thing you should do is to reset the computer's password (yes computers have passwords in AD). You can do it via ADUC right click computer choose reset or dsmod ComputerDN -reset from cmd So the correct procedure is: 1. Reset Computer Account 2. Join new computer do domain (in your case computer you created from image) You can tell the admin, that deleting the computer account in such cases is a bad practice becasue your computer will loose it group membership (yes computers can be group members in AD) and it will change its SID Oh and BTW. It is an Exchange Forum, you should ask such questions in AD / Windows forumsWith kind regards Krystian Zieja http://www.projectnenvision.com Follow me on twitter My Blog

Thanks! That makes sense. Sorry about posting in the wrong area.