Re: Disk with NTDS failing

Thanks Cliff this is good stuff.

The procedure outlined in that KB article assumes you can get AD to start.
For instance, the procedure has you running Ldp.exe. I can only get into my
server as local Admin - AD won't start if I boot up normally.

My boot drive is F: (A mirrored RAID volume). The failing drive is C:. I
have been able to copy C:\SysVol and C:\NTDS to another drive for safekeeping.

But without being able to boot normally, I don't think I can do a proper
system state backup.

Your suggestion of "replace the disk and do a system-state restore" sounds
promising. Admittedly, I know little about AD - I know it keeps track of
domains, computers, users, etc. In my case, those things are simple and
static. So I hope that restoring from a month-old backup won't cause too many
problems.

What I *don't* want is to overwrite my mail and all that other stuff. And
I've never tried a restore from one of these SBS backups. Can you restore the
"system state" without losing mail, etc?

I clearly do have some corruption - I can't get lsass.exe to start on normal
boots. When you said "need to do some repairs," can you be more specific? How
do I do those repairs? If I can do some repairs and get the thing to boot
normally, I could do the SysVol move procedure outlined in that KB article.

Thanks again for your help Cliff.

-Bryan


"Cliff Galiher" wrote:

You can try moving sysvol with this procedure:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/842162

But you will also likely need to do some repairs since it sounds as though
you already have corruption. Worst case, you may have to replace the disk
(assigning it the same drive letter), do a system-state restore, and *then*
move sysvol...but with the disk replaced, moving it may no longer be
necessary either.

Any which way, hope this helps, and good luck. Let me know if it works
out...

-Cliff


"Pallium" <Pallium@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:8D121E07-DB41-4F4E-9E06-D9F9D7E4E186@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi everyone,

I've got an SBS 2003 SP2 server. The disk on which NTDS resides (not the
boot disk), is failing, and keeping lsass.exe from starting. I can boot
into
Directory Services Restore Mode, logged in as machine Admin.

My AD event log has events indicating that AD can't access its database,
such as this (event ID 508)

NTDS (412) NTDSA: A request to write to the file "C:\NTDS\temp.edb" at
offset 172032 (0x000000000002a000) for 122880 (0x0001e000) bytes
succeeded,
but took an abnormally long time (122 seconds) to be serviced by the OS.
This
problem is likely due to faulty hardware. Please contact your hardware
vendor
for further assistance diagnosing the problem.

SO:
How do I move directory services (x:\NTDS) to a different disk? Or if that
is impossible, recreate it on another disk?

Thanks,
Bryan


.

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