Exception during AD provisioning - "A Device Attached to the system is not functioning"

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Symptoms

During provisioning, the creation of an Active Directory account will fail with the exception "A device attached to the system is not functioning."

Diagnosis

This error can occur when invalid data is passed to the AD attribute sAMAccountName.
If you encounter this error, check to see if the provisioning process fills in this attribute.

Solution

Ensure the value of the attribute meets the following requirements:

• 20 characters or fewer
• The final character is not a period (.)
• The value does not contain the characters "/ \ [ ] : ; | = , + * ? < >
• The value is unique among all security principal objects within the domain