Domain controller failure and reinstall 1

[meby]

I've inherited a network recently and I just got hit with a critical failure of the primary hard drive of our domain controller. I wasn't able to recover anything from the drive and had to install a new drive and reinstall server 2k. My problem is that we have 2 other servers on the domain that are setup as GCs and as far as I can tell no backup DCs.

I've reinstalled 2k on the server and when I go to setup the active directory information I can get as far as which domain to join and it errors out. I can hit browse and see mysite.com as well as student.mysite.com as a valid domain but when I try to join mysite.com it is says that it cannot find it. I'm at a loss as to what I'm supposed to do now to get my primary DC back online so my network can function again.

Any suggestions?

Thank you,
Mark Eby
Director of Technology
Hugo Schools

 

[LWComputingMVP]

So the server is NOT using RAID?

I'd strongly recommend you correct that NOW.

You can't have GCs on anything other than a domain controller - so if you have two other Global Catalog servers, those ARE domain controllers and essentially your backups (not that they should be - I hope you've done system state backups on each since and implemented a routine backup procedure).

So, you likely just need to clean up Active Directory, removing references to the dead domain controller before putting the reinstalled one back.

Note: It's possible, if the failed DC was your FSMO master for any or all of the FSMO roles that you'll now have to seize them - this is not a fun thing to do, but SHOULD be possible and you really have little choice in the matter right now. See the links below for instructions on doing so.

Reference:

http://www.petri.co.il/delete_failed_dcs_from_ad.htm

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216498

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Windo...5e8c-4a5c-9f66-4a486a7114fd1033.mspx?mfr=true

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255504