I started my morning by troubleshooting on-premises Active Directory domain join process in my demo environment. Windows 10 OS used was build 2004.

Domain Join failed and I received the following error

  • Event 4097
  • Error code 1003

This error is a bit unusual and I couldn’t find any reason for domain join error from W10 logs. I also tested that DNS worked correctly. As many have said, it’s always DNS:)

Next stop was my Domain Controller and there I found root cause for this behavior and domain join error.

Event id 2092 indicates a replication error in FSMO role holder. Reason for this is that I had another domain controllers in the domain but those were offline. FSMO role holder needs to perform initial replication with the replication partners before it’s considered as valid.

Because we are talking of my demo environment I removed the FETADC02 that has been offline for couple of weeks. I real production environment, troubleshooting of replication would be needed in this case.

Removal of offline domain controller

Delete all the metadata

Confirmation that you really want to delete a global catalog server

I also changed FSMORoleOwner attribute for DNS partitions that had deleted domain controller as owner.

When offline domain controller was cleaned my replication tables were empty and I was able to join my device to the on-prem Active Directory.

Hope this helps if you are struggling with same error!