Problem of 2 windows with same SID

Two Windows box in the same network shouldn’t using same SID. But it’s strange that I have never get into a duplicated SID problem by cloning my existing windows VMs and put them into one windows network. I have even developed a list of templates VMs for most of the Windows OS. All I need to do when I need to new machine is to clone the template, they are all from the same a few templates.  For example, Psgetsid shows that all the XP VMs have the same SID, however they are in the same network, and have never give me any problem.

            S-1-5-21-725345543-1682526488-1957994488       XP51 Clone

S-1-5-21-725345543-1682526488-1957994488       XP51

Anyway, recently I run into this problem with cloning a Windows 2003 Server R2 VM. There is no problem to join the domain till I try to login to the domain. Here is the error message.

The problem is due to this Windows and AD controller are both clone from the same Windows I created as a template, so they have the same SID. 

To solve this problem, I used Microsoft’s SysPrep tool, and created a new template, then cloned this template to build a new VM. The problem still exist. I did 2 tests, just made sure I did follow my instruction no wrong.  Obviously the sysprep wasn’t success.

To prove it, I found psgetsid.exe tool shows that these 2 boxes from same syspreped image, and the AD controller is also from the same image before sysprep.  

S-1-5-21-1623163922-654890622-3203205963       Both system cloned from the syspreped image have the same SID

S-1-5-21-1623163922-654890622-3203205963       Even the AD controller cloned from the image before Sysprep have the same SID.

The reason I found is my instruction I found online used sysprep with reseal  and nosidgen option. Refer to sysprep for details of sysprep.