AD restore when a drive fails 1

[Cervantes]

Hi!
So, Murphy rose from the grave to get me today, and now I have Zombie Murphy bite marks on my ass. Here's what happened.

My main server was in need of replacement, so I transfered everything to a backup server, ran some DCPROMO, got everything running fine. There were issues with getting the main server up, delays, etc, but the backup server was behaving fine so I wasn't too concerned. I had a tape drive to back things up, I just needed a different SCSI cable, which should arrive this week.

So, I'm doing my thing yesterday, check the system logs, see some disk errors being reported on a non-RAID drive that I put in to hold about 80G of stuff. I set up a disk check, reboot, wander off to do other things. Come back, and that drive is making fun clicking sounds. Crap. I'm unhappy but not worried. Disconnect, reboot server. Now the server won't start up. I get lsass.exe error 0xc000000f ("The system can't find the specified file")

I go into DSRM, run NTDSUTIL. My DB, backup, and working directory are all fine on the C: drive. The log directory is pointing to the drive that died. I didn't think I'd done that, but obviously my late-night server swap caused some brain cells to die.

So, here's the question... is it possible to get the server back up and running when the database, backup, and working directory for AD are fine, but the log file directory is nonexistant?

Please help!

 

[kmcferrin]

If you have a recent backup of the box then an AD restore would be your quickest (and easiest) solution. I hit the MSKBs looking for a solution.

Normally I wouldn't expect AD to not start up if it couldn't find previous log files. But if it couldn't create new log files in the specified location then that would be an issue. You can try changing the location where AD log files are stored using NTDSUTIL, and that may be enough to get you booted and creating new logs. At that point you will definitely want a fresh backup done pretty much immediately.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816120/en-us

This link may be helpful too:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/258062/en-us

 

[Cervantes]

Managed to use a utility called "Testdisk" to recover the data off my hard drive, even though Windows was sure it was boned. It's freeware and GPL:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Used a USB drive to move it to the server, and then the links above to reconfigure AD to look in a new location for the logs... and now all is well.

Thanks, kmcferrin!