Please wait while the domain list is created. – WINDOWS 2003 SERVER

Intention of the post is to help others who might have a similar condition when migrating their legacy workload running on Windows 2003.

• We migrated few Windows Server from Datacenter to Cloud using a third party tool.
• Most of the servers were Windows 2008 r2 and above.
• To test our perseverance, we had to migrate a legacy web server running on Windows 2003.
• Source and Destination were in a different Active Domain with a Trust established.
• As per the process, we removed the server from source domain and renamed the server with that of target naming convention.
• Not to mention that the server was rebooted whenever prompted.(i.e Domain removal and Hostname change).
•  We added the server to the target domain and rebooted the server.
• Server was back online but with a message when trying to login with domain credential.
  

  Error

   Please wait while the domain list is created.

• We showed our patience for 15 mins with no luck.
• However, We took an another RDP window and logged in using local admin account.
• We checked out all the other possibilities including the computer account across all domain controllers, DNS forward record and Reverse record.
• All seems to be fine giving us no hope until we found a Netlogon error message in system log.
  

  System Log

  “Failed to create/open file \system32\config\netlogon.ftl with the following error: Access is denied.”

• After trying to read various articles, most of them were irrelevant and could not provide resolution.
  

  Resolution

• However, we could find a resolution when we followed the below procedure.
  • This error occurs when the hidden attribute is set on “%SYSTEMROOT%\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\netlogon.ftl.” 
  • The resolution is removing this hidden attribute by typing the following command at the command prompt:
    attrib -h %SYSTEMROOT%\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\netlogon.ftl