Comments on: How to deal with “Login Failure: the target account name is incorrect” on a Windows file share

By: Jenn

Jenn — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 21:43:40 +0000

Still a useful article, as well as useful comments. I followed Grant’s suggestion from Nov 2009. I had just one workstation with this issue. I removed it from network/AD, deinstalled ‘Client for Microsoft Networks’ from the network adapter, rebooted, reinstalled it and rebooted. Re-added to the domain, and now I can access the workstation’s shared drive. I was two seconds away from re-imaging the thing, so thanks!

By: Chalise

Chalise — Thu, 27 May 2010 15:27:56 +0000

I also had this problem, but it was occurring when a Powershell script was running WMI queries on a workstation that had recently been renamed. Turns out someone was adding a new machine to AD every time he was deploying a machine that was previously named something different on the domain instead of renaming it. A network connection repair and log on/off was all that was needed to fix it on the workstation and fix the problem.

By: Narayan

Narayan — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 06:18:15 +0000

Hi,

I faced same issue, but on a VM.
I have created a snapshot on Win 2k3 vm and tried to use the snapshot after 2 months.
My snapshot has a setup of web application so when ever I try to use it, I got “No authority could be contacted xxx ” message on browser and Login Failue if i try to access the HDD of the VM.

Fix:

My network admin said that, if snapshot is of 1 month old and we revert back to it then the VM is automatically kicked out of domain and we need to add it back again.

Regards,
Narayan

By: David

David — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 02:23:23 +0000

Thanks, I found the same thing. Some PCs on my network continued to work whilst others did not. All worked with FQDN. Removed from second domain. What was obviously happening was it was trying to connect to the box with the creds from the other domain. Thanks!

By: Grant

Grant — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:14:15 +0000

Had a similar problem on one of our clients, but no duplicate workstations or child domains. The solution was to Uninstall the ‘Client for Microsoft Networks’ from the network adapter, reboot, reinstall and reboot. Problem fixed.

By: Dirk M

Dirk M — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:08:58 +0000

Well thanks,

After more than a year this is still valid. We had the same problem on XP stations after a domain migration (still in progress). Deleting the servers account in the source domain solved the error for us.

By: Steve T

Steve T — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 19:11:42 +0000

Hmm. Well, I’ve got the problem on 2 XP workstations in a Win2k3 domain…

I’ve removed them from the domain, rebooted, removed their records from ADUC, rebooted, checked DNS, ADUC, added back on to the domain, (for some reason I can only add them to the domain if I use the FQDN – hmmm…), ran ipconfig /flushdns & nbtstat -R.

I eventually log back on to them as the domain admin and run “dir \\domaincontroller\c$” (to test DNS & security in 1 hit) and from the workstation to the DC works fine… the other way around doesn’t work (”target account name….” error still) weird!

There must be something else that’s jammed up…

By: David

David — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 05:50:11 +0000

Thanks… this twigged me into figuring out my problem. It wasn’t the same thing, but close enough for me to put the pieces together. I’m putting this in here in case it helps the next schmuck Googling around, pulling his hair out.

We have two AD domains with a trust between them. My issues was that a batch of computers were “temporarily” put on the other domain. The problem was, those old domain accounts were not deleted after the computers were moved back to my domain. Local domain accounts would work fine, but the other domain accounts couldn’t do some very specific things. The process was trying to use the old, now with invalid password, computer accounts on the other domain. Obvious, once you see it, but I wasted a lot of time going around in circles. So yeah, two separate computer accounts with the same computer name can cause very strange things… funny how that works.

By: matt

matt — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:44:07 +0000

I get this same error when trying to access my Windows XP workstation form other (but not all) workstations in my subnet:

C:\>net use m: \\myworkstation\c$
System error 1396 has occurred.

Logon Failure: The target account name is incorrect.

Thanks to the Anonymous Hero above I learned that “The kerberos client received a KRB_AP_ERR_MODIFIED error from the server host/myworkstation.domain.ext The target name used was cifs/myworkstation. This indicates that the password used to encrypt the kerberos service ticket is different than that on the target server. Commonly, this is due to identically named machine accounts in the target realm (DOMAINB), and the client realm.” (from event log).

By: anonymous coward

anonymous coward — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 19:21:19 +0000

The error has to do with conflicting kerberos information. You will typically see event id 4 with a source of kerberos in the System EventLog.