Re: Saving and transferring AD information

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Thanks Cary for all your information. The last thing I was trying Friday was
one more attempt to run the repair option on the installation CD for W2K
Server. This got me going back in the Fall. The CD drive, which rarely is
used at all, was evidently full of dust so I’m going to replace that
tomorrow, Sunday.

Before all this happened Friday in addition to the installation service in
the OS being inoperable there was also no way to get any of the network
functions to display. The task – whether it was displaying the network
connections, NIC properties or whatever - would always stop and I’d have to
stop it in the Task Manager. Whether this would have allowed any results
from dcdiag I don't know. At last attempt last night the OS was hanging at
the bootup banner so all I may have to go on is what's on the backup tape and
the mirrored drive which is all the important things anyway. I was hoping
to avoid having to go to each workstation and take each out of the old domain
and reenter them to the new along with the other evolutions that go on with
all this.

From what I have been able to gather there was a notice put out sometime in
the distant past that APC’s software for their UPS’s had a glitch in its
programming that would really mess things up if it wasn’t upgraded to a later
version. I never got the notice and it apparently happened - in spades –
last August. This pretty much gutted this system and another one I take care
of at a school not far from me – both on the same day. I spent a couple of
months putting the school back together as it took out all three servers
there, all had a UPS attached to them, and have been trying to find a week or
so to put this system back into running order since then with no luck. I
guess the bloated batteries in the UPS attached to this DC made that time for
me. They were probably less than two years old and I wasn't expecting them
to go out for another year.

The DC server is still OK for the 25 workstations there at the office – a
Dell PowerEdge 1400SC with two 800Mhz PIII processors with a couple of U360
drives and 768MB of RAM. No speed demon but it carried the load pretty well.
With a $10K budget and 10 schools’ classrooms to take care of in our special
ed. cooperative if it weren’t for buying and selling on eBay and the grant we
got a couple of years ago we’d be in a world of hurt for sure right now.
Perhaps still back in the NT 4 days. I’ll be in conference with our director
on Monday about a good system I’ve found on ebay and I’m sure she’ll OK it.
Between now and the time it comes in I should have the old server back up but
it will be replaced, I promise. I recently put in a new proxy server with
dual Xeon chips (a used Precision Workstation) to replace the even older
600Mhz PIII Optiplex workstation we were running ISA 2000 on. It’s amazing
how much one of these old Dells desktops can take!

Once again, thanks for your candid answers. You're a gem.
Dana

"Cary Shultz" wrote:

Dana,

There is a lot going on here. So, let's take one thing at a time.

And, I might come across as a bit of a ***-head at times. Please do not
take it that way. Black and white does not quite do my words justice.
There is a smile and a grin involved...usually! You will know the
difference!

Okay, small environment, limited funds. Know all too much about that. The
majority of the clients that I handle are five to 15 workstations with one
Server that does everything: Active Directory, Exchange, SQL and a host of
applications. So, I know the feeling. I did not set them up; the company
for which I now work has inherited these customers. Did the former
consultant not know about Small Business Server? Anyway....

You really have several choices. If the server hardware is really old (say,
PIII-733 with 512MB of RAM and Ultra2 Hard Drives) then it might be time to
get new hardware. That all depends on how good you can sell the idea. It
really sounds like this hardware is about to die at any moment. Kinda
sounds like it already has (and then some!). How much does it cost for the
entire company to be down for three days? For one week? Get some new
hardware.

If new hardware is in the cards then I might simply recreate the domain.
However, you did not mention how many clients there are. If there are up to
35 clients then I would look hard at that idea. If there are more then I
might not.

If the new hardware option is on the table then sit on your current server
and use ldifde to create a .ldf file of all the user account objects. And
maybe the groups as well. You really did not mention how many users there
are and how many groups there are. I would do this as a safety new. We
will try to use the backup tape to restore the System State. However, on
different hardware it is a bit more involved. Please take a look at the
following: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=249694. The bad thing would
be that you would have to touch each system to join it to the new domain.
However, you could look into netdom to do this. netdom is part of the
Support Tools. If you are not familiar with the Support Tools then I might
suggest that you change that! ;-)

If the new hardware is not in the cards then I suggest that you do the
ldifde thing anyway. Just make sure to take the .ldf file that you create
an put it on a floppy of on a thumb drive and keep it someplace safe.
Because you know how things go: the Domain Controller crashes big time and
the tape back up has not worked for the last two weeks!

I would not suggest that you install a second Domain Controller into the
environment if things are as messed up as I think that they are. If DNS is
bad (and, have you run dcdiag /c /v against the Domain Controller to see
just what exactly is going on?) then this will probably not work.

To get an idea of what is going on please fun dcdiag /c /v against the
Domain Controller and look for 'fail', 'error' or 'warn'. This is what I
would do first.


--
Cary W. Shultz
Roanoke, VA 24012

"DanaK" <DanaK@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:12F54863-E815-404E-8017-F98B9664999D@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Ok, the inevitable has happened and, as usual, it never happens at the
best
time. My AD DC server OS (Server 2000, sp4) has given up the ghost today
when its UPS cratered and the server went down hard taking the DNS service
with it. For some time it's been limping along with it's Windows
Installer
service hopelessly corrupted, couldn't install the new version because you
need the Installer service to install the Installer, catch-22. I'm
assuming
that is why I can't run the install/upgrade program on my Server 2003 CD.
When I click on the "Install Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition" it
goes
to the Installation window and just stalls there. The Task Manager says
Windows Setup isn't responding.

I've asked several people but I need to know one last time - is it
impossible to preform a System restoration from a system backup tape to a
reinstalled W2K or W2K3 server installation? It's my understanding you
actually need a second backup server already in the domain to promote and
restore the AD information to for this to work. Since we're a small
operation we've never had the funds for a second backup server. Does this
mean we're stuck with a total reinstall? New domain, DNS, DHCP, user and
computer account information, etc., etc.?

Thanks,
Dana



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