Windows 10 not Booting Up after Joining to the Domain

We have encountered a strange problem where after joining a Windows 10 PC to the domain, it won’t boot up.  It was stuck on a black screen where you can see the circle revolving. You will feel like it’s going to boot up but eventually, it won’t and the circle will keep on revolving. We figured that the PC won’t boot up in Safe Mode or even after disconnecting the network cable.


After Resetting the OS multiple times, changing the Hardware, OS installation disk and even the Hardware Vendor, all we will see is the rotating dots for Windows logo after it has been joined to the domain.


After applying different permutations and combinations, we have narrowed it down to the Default Domain Policy.


How did we find out it’s the Default Domain Policy:


We moved the PC to a Test OU and applied Block Inheritance, however, the issue persisted. So we ended up moving the user as well to the Test OU, so there are no policies applied to the user or the computer. And voila, the issue is resolved. Moving the user and the PC back and forth and applying the GPO one by one, narrowed it down to the Default Domain Policy.


We did try to isolate the issue to specific settings in the Default Domain Policy, however, it was too time to consume.


So the solution:

Rebuild the Default Domain Policy from the scratch via dcgpofix command and the issue is resolved.


How to rebuild the Default Domain Policy via dcgpofix ?


Open the administrative command prompt and type the following command and hit Enter.


Dcgpofix /ignoreschema /target:Domain