Backup and Recovery of an AD domain controller.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jeff Hauff
  • Start date Start date
J

Jeff Hauff

Hey, this past weekend I had an interesting experience. During preps for
upgrading from a 2000 domain to a 2003 domain, the DC was running a full
backup when something happened and caused the controller to crash and not
restart.

To make a long story short, I found this utility called UMOVE from
www.utools.com. This allowed my to put the old drive into another 2000
server and do an emergency move of the AD info to the new computer and it
did not make a single change to the orig hard drive. It moved everything
necessary to bring up the new server as a domain controller and the work
stations didn't know the difference.

It did have some trouble moving the DHCP scopes but those were easily
rebuilt.

Anyhow I just thought I would pass this on to those that may have similar
situations.

By the way, after doing the postmortum on the orig drive, it appears that
the services file was the cause. It grew to large for the system to be able
to boot it. Not sure why yet but thats the file that caused it to not boot.
A restore of an earlier version allowed it to boot and there are KB's on the
file being too large to load.

Have fun,
Jeff
 
True... UMOVE.EXE is not supported by Microsoft. But then again most of the
great utilities are not anyhow.

And its also true that this solution worked very well for me in the specific
situation that I was presented with. And it saved me countless hours of
work. Each person should evaluate their specific situation and make their
own decision.



"Jorge de Almeida Pinto [MVP - DS]"
 
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