We have a domain with only one W2k Server, and it is totally isolated with no internet connectivity at all. The other day we got a message "Directory Services could not start because of the following error: There is not enough space on the disk..." But there is plenty of free space on each of the 2 drives.
This network was set up before I started here recently. Even before this happened, I had been looking at the event logs and there are plenty of DNS, GPO, and other strange errors shown. We logged in to the DS Restore Mode, since that is the only option. I've tried several ntdsutil commands and they all appear to complete successfully. We even tried to restore an old System State backup, but it was too old.
The strange thing is that this server doesn't recognize the domain. When you go the the Network Identification tab, it just shows the domain as "Unknown", and the properties button is disabled. I think this is they key to the whole mess. Could this "unknown" domain be because it's in safe mode when using the restore mode? If you browse the entire network, it lists this server under the domain AND in a workgroup. If you go to one of the workstations on this domain, it lists the server under the domain, but you obviously can't expand and browse the files.
I was just wondering if anybody has suggestions for now, rather than reinstalling Active Directory. It looks like there's more problems than just AD, so we would probably need to restore the Server OS from scratch. I think we're going to upgrade to Server 2003 soon because of this.
Also, this domain is isolated from the outside world, and the workstations on it are doing very specialized tasks. They're not using the server for any kind of data storage, so even with the corrupted AD, they're able to login using cached accounts, and function properly (so far!) despite the server problems. They don't reboot these workstations very often.
Any tips would be appreciated. Thank you!
This network was set up before I started here recently. Even before this happened, I had been looking at the event logs and there are plenty of DNS, GPO, and other strange errors shown. We logged in to the DS Restore Mode, since that is the only option. I've tried several ntdsutil commands and they all appear to complete successfully. We even tried to restore an old System State backup, but it was too old.
The strange thing is that this server doesn't recognize the domain. When you go the the Network Identification tab, it just shows the domain as "Unknown", and the properties button is disabled. I think this is they key to the whole mess. Could this "unknown" domain be because it's in safe mode when using the restore mode? If you browse the entire network, it lists this server under the domain AND in a workgroup. If you go to one of the workstations on this domain, it lists the server under the domain, but you obviously can't expand and browse the files.
I was just wondering if anybody has suggestions for now, rather than reinstalling Active Directory. It looks like there's more problems than just AD, so we would probably need to restore the Server OS from scratch. I think we're going to upgrade to Server 2003 soon because of this.
Also, this domain is isolated from the outside world, and the workstations on it are doing very specialized tasks. They're not using the server for any kind of data storage, so even with the corrupted AD, they're able to login using cached accounts, and function properly (so far!) despite the server problems. They don't reboot these workstations very often.
Any tips would be appreciated. Thank you!
so maybe there is some problem with creating transaction log files, check at least the permissions for the folder where you store the tx logs (edb*.log) or try offline defrag of the database file (ntds.dit)