Azure AD Join Error 80180026

I have been using my Microsoft Surface Pro 4 which is part of my corporate domain and I wanted to remove it from the Corp domain and join to it Microsoft Corp Azure AD.

I wanted the device to be managed only my Microsoft Intune and did not want any GPO's etc to come down on to the device and that's when I tried to join it to the Microsoft Azure AD.

Every time I tried to join it to Azure AD I was faced with the below error.

There is very little documentation about the error online and thought I must write this post when I resolve it.

So what was the issue?

I was able to join my other devices to Microsoft Azure AD without any issues. So what was different with this device and my other devices.

After working on a support ticket with my internal helpdesk they were not sure what the actual issue was. One of the support engineers asked me to try uninstalling the SCCM Client and then try to join to  Azure AD again.

This device was part of the corporate domain and was being managed by System Center and removing the machine from the corporate domain does not remove the System Center Configuration Manager client from the machine. It made sense to try this, however, the  SCCM client is shown in the control panel but there is no way to remove it from Add/Remove programs since it does not show up there.

So here is how I uninstalled it.

Open an elevated cmd prompt and run the below command.

Once this was done I was able to successfully join the machine to Microsoft Azure AD.