Disaster Recovery onto new hardware

  • Thread starter Thread starter JB
  • Start date Start date
J

JB

We're preparing for our disaster recovery drill soon and
I need to be able to rebuild our AD from 3 DCs to a
single DC. To make things even more fun the hardware is
entirely different. I'm struggling to get this to work.
Anyone know the best way to do this? Are there any GOOD
whitebooks for this? The only one I found provided
little help.
 
Restoring to disimilar hardware can really be difficult to
make work. Especially alot of the hardware is different.
We just have to get the drivers right for all the
hardware. There is not a shortcut. This is a difficult
process.
 
I know it won't be easy. Other than drivers, what else
should I know? Do I need to run any utilities against AD
to make it work?
 
Give up? Not an option. We have a DR drill this
weekend. I *HAVE TO* do this. Oh well. Guess I'm on my
own here.
 
Ok, well I'll try to tell you how I got it to work but it seems to work
differently each time..

1) Load your new Win2k server with exactly the same service pack &
components i.e. DNS /DHCP, certificate server as the old server.
2) Make sure to create the same drive partitions on the new server as the
old one.
3) Make sure to give the server the same name.
4) Don't install any third party drivers on the new machine, infact, before
I restored the system state, I uninstalled the assigned video and network
adapter via device manager.
5) Restore the system state, opting to overwrite existing files.
6) Reboot server - it probably won't boot. So this is where the nightmare
begins.
7) Reboot and stick in the Windows Setup disk (and note, I have had nothing
but problems with any other disk than origional Microsoft hologram disks)
slipstreamed or ISO burned CD's just seem to throw errors during the setup.
8) Start windows setup at boot time but don't go straight into the repair
process, instead press enter as if you were going to setup windows and then
after you press F8 to accept the license agreement, then go through the
repair process. This will clean out the HAL and start from fresh.

Let me know how you get on as I'm sure there is more input I could give you
from experience but this really is tricky to get right.
 
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