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Disaster Recovery: AD FRS problem

I am currently doing off-site testing of our backups and having a minor issue I was hoping someone could shed some light on or point me in the right direction for resolving. We are a school district and our backup needs are not the same as a for profit business, so we are doing a mixture of backups both using backup exec, as well as nightly full backups using Windows Backup on a few 2008 R2 machines. Such as 1 domain controller that holds our FSMO roles, and our Mail Server which is hosting exchange 2010.

My problem is, when I restore the DC in our test environment, FRS is not up and running for several hours because it cannot find the other 2 domain controllers we normally have in our production environment. So AD is not fully up and running. After a few hours of sitting, it magically starts working and event logs showing FRS is no longer preventing the machine from being a DC.

Is there something I can do to quickly resolve the issue in case of a real DR situation? Once its fully up, I just do a metadata cleanup and remove the other DC's replicas in my test environment, but can't do that until FRS is up and running. Any help would be greatly appreciated! =)

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Mahesh

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NoodlesWIU

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Part of the reason we are doing extensive testing is to migrate to DFSR. We still have 2 DC's that are 2003 and want to decomission them and bring first up to a 2008 R2 mixed environment and then decomission the 2008 R2 and put in place a 2016 so we can bring up to a full functional level of 2016. I did just start working with the bur flags and metadata cleanup an hour ago or so ago so I'm glad to know I was on the right track. I just reversed the order. The DC was already the FSMO holder for all roles so I didn't need to complete that step of seizing them.

I had a Directory in my C:\Windows\SYSVOL\domain folder called "do_not_remove_ntfrs_preinstall_directory" with the policies and scripts for our domain in it that was not there during the original backup. I did some digging and stopped the FRS service, and cut and paste the policies and scripts folders from the do_not_remove_ntfrs_preinstall_directory folder and pasted them just outside this folder and set the burflags to D4 as in your suggestion then restarted the FRS service.

Thanks for your help!

I then did the metadata cleanup, so I just reversed the order. Seems to work. There are a few warning/error events kicking off every so often, but nothing stopping the election of the DC.