Active Directory restore in 2008 R2

[fakesoundofprogress]

Hello all,

I am hoping someone can help me. Did restoring system state and AD objects in R2 change from how it was done pre-R2? Normally I would boot into DSRM, restore the system state using wbadmin, and then use ntdsutil to do an authoritative restore. This worked fine on plain old 2008 DCs I've used it on.

Now, I've recently tried this procedure on R2. After I restore the system state, I am prompted to reboot. This happens for wbadmin and the GUI as well. I've tried ignoring these prompts to open a command prompt and run ntdsutil, but I can't open a command prompt. I receive an error. Same is true for trying to open anything else like Windows Explorer. As a matter of fact, after the system state restore finishes, the dialog boxes that report the error are missing text making it very hard to read what they are telling me.

If I reboot, the system state restore does complete OK, and I can see the missing objects that were restored, but if I had more than one DC and just wanted to retrieve a single object, I am having a tough time doing that.

So, I thought I'd throw this out there if anyone else has any experience with R2 and system state restores. I don't know if it is just my VM that is flukey or if I am doing something wrong. I know about the AD recycle bin feature for R2, which is great, but I am concerned if I was in a situation where the forest functional level was not 2008R2 or the Recycle Bin wasn't turned on.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[pagy]

I just tested this and when the system state restore finishes I can open up another CMD windows and do the authoritative restore.

What error do you get when you try to open another CMD window?


Paul
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[fakesoundofprogress]

Hey thank you for confirming this. I am not sure what's going on. I've tried this on 2 different VMs.

After the restore finishes, if I try to open a command prompt I get a box saying (apologies, this is not a direct quote, I'm going from memory):

C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe

C:
The parameter is incorrect.

I've tried to open other Windows like a Powershell prompt and get the same error. If I try opening say, My Computer, I get an error like:

"the object exporter specified was not found