Restoring to new hardware

[Aloneagain]

I've just taken a windows 2000 active directory server off line (having backed up and saved system state). I then put a scsi raid controller in it and added a disk (it was a mirrored pair previously on the other scsi board before)

I was "optomistically" hoping that I would be able to install W2K on the new config and then restore the active directory - users and all. However, having rebuilt and reinstalled the restore of the backup had the obvious effect. As it tried to reboot it was looking on the wrong scsi board and couldn't find the boot partition.

It seems to me that this is common requirement. Customer smachine goes down and you need to use whatever hardware you can find to provide a service until the old hardware is replaced or repaired. Really what you want to be able to do is restore the "soft" part of the AD and layer it onto the hardware components.

So... Is there a way around this ???

 

[markdmac]

Not trying to be flippant here, but the solution is to have a second DC. That way you could rebuild and run DCPROMO to have the server grab AD, you only need to restore data then.

Otherwise you need to restore to similar hardware.

I hope you find this post helpful. Please let me know if it was.

Regards,

Mark

 

[Aloneagain]

Not flippant at all - in fact that is one of the things i would have done if I had to do this again. It just seems to me that most people want to upgrade their hardware at some point and that their ought to be a way of restoring to the new config. Thought I mught be missing something obvious.

In this situation the company has only the one server (which is why I was ugrading them to RAID5 in the first place)

 

[markdmac]

In your situation another option is to simply set up a temporary server. Let it replicate AD. transfer the FSMO roles to the temp server. Rebuild the old server with the new drives. DCPROMO it. Transfer the 5 FSMO roles back and then run DCPROMO on the temp server to get rid of it. You could use a workstation as a temporary server since you just need it to hold your AD. when all is up and running restore just your data to the old server.

I hope you find this post helpful. Please let me know if it was.

Regards,

Mark