According to this thread on this blog someplace, if you duplicate a virtual hard drive which has a Windows operating system on it, and then try to add both to an active directory domain you’ll get this funky error message (on the second machine registered, most likely):
Each machine is assigned a security identifier when it is built. This is essentially a GUID, which is then used for a variety of things, none the least security and encryption. It’s important that these be unique. When adding two machihnes to the same domain with the same SID, you can see the potential problems.
The fix is to download Mark Russinovich’s (SysInternals, now Microsoft) newSID utility from this location.
Be wary that chaning a system’s SID could take a long time, as the file system needs to be updated (if you are using NTFS) as does the system registry.
I’ve tested out the solution, and it works. It also makes a lot of sense too.
Make sure you aren;’t connected to a domain when you change a machine’s SID. I prfer to take it off onto a workgroup to be sure.
