Wednesday 19 September 2018

AD CS reinstall causes templates to show "Template information could not be loaded. Element not found."

After a reinstall of AD CS when you try to expand the Certificate Templates pane of the Certificate Authority MMC it throws the error "Template information could not be loaded. Element not found.".


To resolve this you need to use ADSI Edit from one of your Domain Controllers. Open ADSI Edit and connect to the Configuration partition, expand CN=Services, CN=Public Key Services and find CN=Certificate Templates. Right click on CN=Certificate Templates and select Properties


The error is caused because the Computer Object of the newly install AD CS server does not have Read permissions on the Certificate Templates top level folder. Add the Computer Object and grant it Read permissions. 


It's a good idea at this point to force an AD replication cycle.

Relaunch the Certificate Authority MMC and refresh Certificate Templates, please not you will have to recreate any of your Certificate Templates before the reinstall, these will also need republished to AD before they can be used for enrollment.