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The Active Directory is rebuilding indices. Please wait

I have a Domain Controller that is displaying this message on bootup...
The Active Directory is rebuilding indices. Please wait

It has been running and displaying this message for about 10 hours. I have until Monday to get this back going. Someone shut off power to it accidently, and when it was running check disk it found and repaired some file indicies. How long should I let this run before I should try something else. I have about 40 users in active directory. What else should I try?

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Brian Pierce

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Tom_Hickerson

ASKER

I pulled the plug after 18 hours. On bootupt it ran checkdisk, and found several errors. Then I ran the raid check disk utilites. It said 1 of the hard drives is bad even though it says the array is healthy. I degraded the array to not include the bad hard drive, and now I am back at the rebuilding indicies.

How long should I wait to try something else? I was going to book in safemode and try a chkdsk /f. But I have to force it off to do that.

Tom_Hickerson

ASKER

OK. now I am worried. The rebuilding took about 20 min, but when the comptuer booted back up, and I tried to launch active directory. I got the error that...
the workstation driver is not installed, and an empty active directory came up... What do I do now?

Tom_Hickerson

ASKER

OK. I rebooted and it came back up working this time. What should I do to get a backup of the active directory? I do a microsoft backup, but that probably won't help if I have to restore AD.

Brian Pierce

One good way to make sure that you can retrieve AD quickly is to install another domain controller, this makes sure that there is always a second copy and if a DC fails AD can be restored very quickly. Of course you should still do a backup as well - the system state includes AD .

Tom_Hickerson

ASKER

I have 3 servers... Terminal Server, DC, and SQL server. If any of them go down I am screwed. We talked about a spare server, but which one? Do you think the DC is the most important?