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drivenit

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Crashed Domain Controller

Hello

I have a primary windows 2008 r2 domain Controller that crashed yesterday. I am going to have to rebuild it today. Good thing is there are few users on the domain currently, bad news is i have no backups.
I have an Exchange 2010 Server, SharePoint Server, Backup Domain Controller up and running currently. I tried launching the Exchange Management Console and add a user and it failed to attach to the domain. I am going onsite today to rebuild the DC is there anyone out there  that has a good idea how to do this? I.E. build the dc with the same name and ip? use different name but same ip? Can i transfer FSMO roles with no backup?
Any help or direction on whats best?

Thanks in Advance.
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Brian Pierce
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Since you have a backup domain controller you are in good shape. You will need to seize whatever roles the crashed server held.
http://www.petri.co.il/seizing_fsmo_roles.htm
I would not try naming it the same. You can keep the same IP address. Just make sure you reinstall any roles or services that were running on old dc
The exchange management console is probably not opening because the old server was a global catalog server. Make the backup controller a GC and exchange should open. Also make your new server a GC
Sorry - I misread you question - you do have another DC - so yes you can transfer the FSMO roles to the remaining DC - Dont forget to make sure the remaining DC is aslo a GC and DNS server (and DHCP id you use it), and configure the remaining DC to use itself for DNS.

Once that has been done simply decommission the failed DC and delete it from AD (2008R2 will automatically do the metadata clean-up)

You can then simply rebuild the failed DC with the same name/IP
Also you will need to remove the old DC.
http://fawzi.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/remove-failed-dc-from-ad-manually-never-been-easier/

The exchange server may have been "hardcoded" to use the old DC, so you will want to set it to "automatic"

No you can not transfer the roles you will have to seize them.
Yikes.  As KCTS stated, you are in a bad place.  If you cannot recover the existing controller, you will need to build the domain from scratch and then rejoin all your other servers.  It is absolutely critical to have more than one domain controller on your environment, especially if you are not backing up or imaging the domain controller.  Obviously, that doesn't help you now, but will help avoid this in the future.
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drivenit

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Thanks for the advise guys.
1) Delete old DC from schema (look for kb at microsoft.com)
2) Install new one DC
3) Transfer roles
4) Configure Exchange for new DC (there is an option)

And use the other name and the other IP for new DC
Hey guys thanks for the help

I recreated the PDC I had to reboot the BDC which then blue screened so I was unable to grab the roles off the BDC sucks.
The Blue screen on Both BDC and PDC both stated Active Directory corruption. I tried to restore from shadow copy using this article.

http://activedirectorytools.com/archives/windows-server-2008-snapshots-with-ntdsutil-and-dsamain/

It did not work said i needed Active directory services up and running. The Domain is for 27 users of which only 4 were actively using.


ended having to recreate anyway