Recovering from Minor LSA Corruption

You might see event ID 5714 on the primary domain controller (PDC), or event ID 5716 on one or more backup domain controllers (BDCs), indicating that replication of the LSA database failed.

This problem occurs because one of the secrets in the LSA database is corrupted. This can happen when the registry is physically corrupted (as in a disk system hardware failure) or when a transaction to the LSA database does not complete and is left in a partially completed state (as in a power failure during a transaction).

If you examine the LSA secrets in the registry, you will see at least one secret that has only one subkey, PolMod. Normal secrets have five subkeys.

To resolve this problem, locate and delete the corrupted secret in the registry on the PDC.

WARNING: If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you may cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that result from using Registry Editor incorrectly. Use Registry Editor at your own risk.

If you examine each secret in the registry, you can locate the corrupted secret manually and no reboot will be required.

You can also find the corrupted secret by installing a checked build of Netlogon.dll and examining the logs that are generated. A Netlogon.log file of this problem will have lines (wrapped for readability) that look like:
From this log, you can see that the LSA secret named G$$TRUSTEDDOMAIN is corrupted.

For more information on obtaining, installing and configuring the checked build of Netlogon.dll, contact Microsoft Product Support Services.

After the corrupted secret is located, delete it.

NOTE: Performing the following procedure across a slow WAN link could be extremely time-consuming (hours). Microsoft recommends that you perform this procedure locally on the PDC.

1. Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe).
2. Locate the following key in the registry:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Security
3. On the Security menu, click Permissions.
4. Change the permissions on this key and all subkeys to:
   
   
   Administrators: Full Control
   System: Full Control
   NOTE: You can safely ignore any errors while applying permissions.
5. Locate the following key in the registry:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Security\Policy\Secrets\secretname
6. On the Edit menu, click Delete.
7. Locate the following key in the registry:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Security
8. On the Security menu, click Permissions.
9. Change the permissions on this key and all subkeys to:
   
   
   Administrators: Special... (only Read Control and Write DAC)
   System: Full Control
   NOTE: You can safely ignore any errors while applying permissions.
10. Quit Registry Editor.

In this example, the corrupted key corresponds to an outgoing trust. You would need to re-establish the trust to TRUSTEDDOMAIN using User Manager for Domains to delete and re-create each end of the trust.

Here is a short list of secrets you might see: Problems of this sort occur only in global secrets because other secrets are not replicated to BDCs by Netlogon. Thus, it is only necessary to inspect secrets beginning with G$.

LSA secrets are stored in the registry under the following registry key: Each LSA secret key will normally have five subkeys:
When a secret changes, the values of each of these keys must be looked up and replicated by Netlogon as part of the normal domain accounts database replication process.

The 5714/5716 event pair is generated when one or more of these values is missing.

During a change to an LSA secret, there is an intermediate state where these five subkeys have been deleted and a temporary key, PolMod, is present. If the transaction is not completed atomically, this key could persist, resulting in a corrupted and non-replicatable LSA secret.