Hello all,

We currently have 3 DC's in our domain and 1 of the DC's crashed. We have
backups of the complete DC through Veritas 10.0. The system state file is
included in this backup. Is there a paper that someone could point me to in
regards to restoring this DC?

Thanks for all your help

Greg

Greg,

I might suggest that you do the easy thing....let it replicate from the two
existing Domain Controllers.

However, this is a very general statement.

So long as it did not crash before it had replicated any changes that it
might have had you should be able to do this.  And I do not see how you
would not have this situation but had a situation where you had a back up of
the System State.  Well, I guess you could have a requirement that you run a
System State backup immediately after creating objects (not very realistic,
but possible).  There are a couple of things to know about AD replication.
One is the concept of 'Originating Write' and 'Replicated Write'.  Huh?
Say, for example, that you create a user account object on DC03.  Say that
you populate seven fields while creating this user account object.  The
values for each of those seven attributes would be an 'Originating Write' on
DC03.  However, when this is replicated to DC01 those are called 'Replicated
Writes'.  Now, let's say that three days later you realize that you really
needed to populate the fields for the street address, the city, the state
and the zip code as well as for the department.  So, you go to DC01 (because
you just happen to be sitting at it at the moment, or - and this is a better
way - the Admin workstation at which you are sitting connects to that DC via
all your tools) and you populate those fields with values.  Now, on DC01
these would be 'Originating Writes'.  When this information replicates to
the other Domain Controllers they would be 'Replicated Writes'.

Go into one of your existing Domain Controllers and use ntdsutil to do a
metadata cleanup.  Be careful with this tool.  It is very powerful.  You
should be fine, though.  Remove the reference to the dead Domain Controller.
You might need to clean up using ADSIEdit (part of the Support Tools) and
take a look in DNS to make sure that there are no more DNS records in there.
Oh, and you might need to actually remove the object for the Domain
Controller in the Active Directory Sites and Services MMC.

Then, after all of these changes have replicated, format the drives and
reinstall Windows 2000.  Then, run the dcpromo process and let it replicate
via this process.  This should be much easier than dealing with the whole
restore process.

Now, did the dead DC perform any services?  Such as DHCP or DNS or anything
else that might need to be restored from Tape Backup?

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perform a non authoritative restore of the DC that crashed or said
otherwise.... restore it from backup

if the DC is still bootable into DSRM, do it and restore at least the system
disk and the system state

if it is not possible to boot the DC. reinstall the OS with the minimum
stuff possible and configure the SAME volumes with the same drive letters
the same way as before.
After that restore at least the system disk and the system state

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