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Dave Denoy

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How to restore missing Group Policy templates

Our AD was originally set up with Server 2003 by someone who seems to have deleted GP templates that control PC and server behavior, such as default apps, screensaver or sleep options, etc.. I have researched articles which point to an app that purports to restore them but I never see any change in available templates. AD migrated to 2008 R2 over past few years and no 2003 DCs are present. Can anyone tell me how to get them back?
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LockDown32
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Interesting topic. Have you researched dcgpofix? Not sure if that is what you are looking for. At the very least it will reset things to "factory default"
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Dcgpofix will only restore the Default Domain Policy and/or Default Domain Controllers Policy GPO to its default settings; it won't do anything to any other GPOs.

I'm afraid that if you don't have a backup of the SYSVOL folder hierarchy that contains the GPO templates you're looking for, they're gone.
These are .ADM or ADMX files (that are the templates) restore them
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Dave Denoy

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There is no backup that predates the very first Server 2003 AD. The person who "did" IT wasn't really an IT guy - it's a case of the one-eyed guy in the Kingdom of the blind. I think he decide on a few he thought necessary and removed the rest. I first came to these systems 6 years ago and it was already like that. The perpetrator was long gone by then and he didn't backup AD.

Is there no way to recreate them, even manually?
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DrDave242
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ah wel... thanks.