Quick Fix: The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed…

We’ve all been there…attempt to open an RDP session to a VM you haven’t connected to in a while and you see the message above! Traditionally the fix for this was to log on as a local admin user, remove the VM from the AD domain (add to workgroup), reboot, log in again, add to AD domain, reboot….well here is a quicker way of resolving the issue with PowerShell.

Modify the username, password and domain controller FQDN and save the following as ResetDomainMembership.ps1 and run on the affected VM as a local administrator

$password = "Password123!" | ConvertTo-SecureString -asPlainText -Force
$username = "domain\administrator"
$credential = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential($username,$password)
Reset-ComputerMachinePassword -Server dc01.domain.local -credential $credential
shutdown -r -t 0

Tip: If you dont want to include the password in the script as this is a security concern you can use a Read-Host command to prompt the user for the password

$password = Read-Host -asSecureString "Please enter the password"