Oops, broke our system rollback! How to fix a broken password lock out in Active Directory?

Isabella Brown 20 Reputation points
2026-07-13T17:34:40.22+00:00

Hello guys, our automated backup system rolled one of our secondary application servers back to an older version.

Now it seems the local administrator password on the machine is completely out of sync with what our main server thinks it should be, and everything is jammed up.

We use the Microsoft LAPS system to handle these passwords, but right now it looks like the password version data inside Active Directory is completely corrupted and throwing errors.

Is there a quick way or a script we can run to force the LAPS system to completely overwrite this broken data and generate a brand new password immediately so we can get back into our server?

Windows for business | Windows 365 Business
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Answer accepted by question author
Tracy Le 12,330 Reputation points Independent Advisor
2026-07-13T18:27:54.2433333+00:00

Hello Isabella Brown,

Snapshot rollbacks are notorious for breaking local admin passwords but you can easily kick off an emergency rotation right from Active Directory without needing to touch the broken server. Since the server went back in time, all you need to do is force Active Directory to think the password has already expired so it generates a fresh one. If you have administrative access, you can open PowerShell on a management machine & run the command Reset-LapsPassword -ComputerName followed by your server name to instantly reset the clock. Alternatively, you can open Active Directory Users and Computers, turn on Advanced Features, look up the server properties, and manually modify the msLAPS-ExpirationTime attribute to a timestamp in the past. Once either method forces the expiration, LAPS will automatically overwrite the corrupted data & set a brand new password for you.

Hope this answer has brought you some useful information. If it did, please hit “accept answer”. Should you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Tracy Le.

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