DNS server not responding

[techtalkpro]

Hello all, I am new to this forum and was hoping i could help of some of you resident experts on here.
I apologise in advance if this post becomes too lengthy but there is some background info to cover.

Rite, im no expert when it comes to building servers, this is the 1st time and i am using server 2008. Ive been assigned this project by my manager to build a file share server. Basically its a stand alone server linked to 5 laptops which will be used as a central data store. More about that later. Now i did manage to build it before with a bit of help and documented the build/test procedure but there are some fine details missing.
The HDD failed on the server and i couldnt recover from backup hence i am having to rebuild it from scratch. Now i am following the build documentation i wrote but i cant even get my AD/DNS to work properly.
I installed and configured Server 2008 using the media kit from scratch and installed the AD Domain services followed by the DNS server role and in the event log it basically says

"The DNS server is waiting for AD DS to signal that the inital sync of the directory has been completed...

1st off, what does this mean? 2ndly am i building the server rite because nothing seems to be the same from last time e.g. my server is called secretserver and domain is Atlantis. Now when you load the networking and sharing centre in control panel it states "Atlantis3"...where did the 3 come from, is it due to the number of time i have installed AD or something?
Please any help would be appreciated..my deadline is for friday..eek!

 

[kmcferrin]

Are you building a file server, or are you building an Active Directory server? If the latter, do you really need AD or is there an existing AD infrastructure that you should be using?

If you previously created a domain called Atlantis and there were resources joined to the domain before the server crashed, then you can't just rebuild the server and give it the same name and then create a new domain with the same name.

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