how to know if a laptop is AD account locked

Question

hi, we are an IT business which recycle laptops and PC's, recently we have had a few machines which once sold the end user are finding them to be AD locked once they have gone through the windows setup. we can usually resolve this by contacting the previous owners to get them decommissioned from AD but obviously it isn't good from a customers prospective. i want to know if there is anyway of knowing if a machine is AD locked without having to go through the set up process on every unit? like could we search the serial number, UUID to find out? any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

hi, the issue isn't Bitlocker related. it can happen even with a completely new storage device. when going through Windows setup, when it ask you to join a network (wired or WiFi) once joined it will do some thinking then come up with "enter your JoeBloggs LTD email address" - this is because it has fired the UUID back to microsoft which then realise that the unit is registered to that company on the AD accounts (if the company de-activate the unit previously it will behave normally during setup)

the issue is we sometimes sell 100's of refurbished units, and nobody knows if they are locked or not until the end user installs Windows.

so i was just thinking if there was any way of finding out if a unit was still active on any AD account before we sell on the devices it would save a lot of trouble