Re: ?re-promoting a demoted DC that used to hold FSMO role

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Oh, follow my earlier posts, you can see the problems. After restoring, the DC is not functioning properly - it cannot replicate to and from any other DCs online. Earlier I said that after 3 repeated power failure (in a intervals of 2 hours yesterday) the DC started up with the directory database corrupted, directory service cannot start. The most I could do was to to restore from the most recent ghost backup image. As you knew already, such restore won't restore it to the correct AD state. I used ntdsutil to seize FSMO roles to the Windows 2003 DC which I promoted last week. Then, I used dcpromo /forceremoval to demote this server. Then, cleanup the metadata of any reference to this server. That was a day's work, I left the office to allow these change of roles to replicate among the living servers. As of now, I could not connect to my VPN server from home (error 718), and have intermittent problems connecting to the Exchange server using OWA ("Error. Access is denied" after 3 authentication dialogs). "Intermittent" because I was able to connect occassionally, without problem.
I'm trying to understand what you mean with "as the DC that hold all the FSMO roles can no longer be properly restored" and later on say "I will force demote the problematic DC and clean the metadata"
 
You are saying it cannot be restored... did it crash?
you can only (force) demote a DC if it is up and running. How come, if you just said you were not able to restore it?
 
AND why is it a problematic DC? Are you talking about AD on the server or the server itself. The answer about DFS depends on the answer for this question.
 
Could yu specify more info on what is wrong or went wrong, or what has been done, error IDs, etc.

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Cheers,
(HOPEFULLY THIS INFORMATION HELPS YOU!)
# Jorge de Almeida Pinto #
BLOG --> http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/jorge/default.aspx
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I have come to the last resort of seizing FSMO role as the DC that hold all the FSMO roles can no longer be properly restored. I will force demote the problematic DC and clean the metadata.
 
My questions:
1. Is it OK to promote the demoted DC again after its FSMO roles are all being seized and demoted?
2. Do I need to remove all the DFS replicas hosted by this server before it is being demoted or promoted?

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Active Directory not working after restore
    ... In addition to the previous post you may need to reset the secure channel of ... > With regard to the last point, you need to seize the FSMO roles. ... > If the original server was just a DC, you could recover by seizing the roles> to a working server and rebuilding the original from scratch. ... I replace the hard disk and perform restore from>> last month in active sirectory restore mode. ...
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    ... > A scenarion I need to get my head around: ... > The only Global catalog server which holds all masters crashes. ... > restore. ... > point I have not siezed the FSMO roles onto another server. ...
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    ... The DC's pointing to themselves can create a situation where they're like ... You can check to see who holds the FSMO roles by running the following ... Or, if you really want to demote the existing server, running DCPROMO to ... demote it will initiate the transfer of each FSMO role to any available DC. ...
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  • Re: Active Directory not working after restore
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