Hi,
 
You have not told us if you are using W2K or W2K3 AD... There is a tiny 
difference between the two...
When doing a bare metal restore I always advise to restore a backup of the 
System Disk (in MS terms it is called the boot volume, and for both it means 
the volume with the WIndows/Winnt directory) AND the System State...
In W2K3 restoring the system state also rebuilds the SYSVOL structure, no 
matter the location of it... When backing up the system state on a w2k DC, you 
should also backup the SYSVOL structure with it. Why?
 
The SYSVOL structure is like:
SYSVOL                                    <------S
       DOMAIN                             <----- A
       STAGING                            <----- B
            DOMAIN                         <----- B
       STAGING AREAS                <----- B
            <DOMAIN NAME>          <----- B
       SYSVOL                             <----- B
            <DOMAIN NAME>          <----- B
 
In W2K3 when restoring the system state the structure mentioned above will be 
restored correctly.
In W2K when restorin the system state the structure mentioned above will NOT be 
restored correctly! In fact it will only restore "A". It will not restore "B".
So in W2K3 it suffices to select the system state to also restore the SYSVOL 
structure
In W2K to restore the SYSVOL structure I advise to select at backup the System 
State AND the SYSVOL structure starting at "S"
So if you are using the default AD/SYSVOL paths and if you restore the system 
disk and the system state everything will be OK as the sysvol structure is 
backupped with the system disk.
If you have AD/SYSVOL on other volumes, for W2K, I advise to backup at least 
the System Disk, the System State and additionally the SYSVOL structure 
starting at "S". This is especially important when doing a bare metal restore.
IMHO, for a DC you should always at least backup the system disk and the system 
state, and if it is a w2k DC also backup the FULL SYSVOL structure.
 
Remember, if you are restoring the first DC in a certain domain you need to 
restore AD non-auth. and SYSVOL auth. (for the latter in other words as PRIMARY)
 
Hope this helps you!

Cheers,
Jorge

________________________________

From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Umer Y.
Sent: Sun 11/13/2005 2:36 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [ActiveDir] Restore twice in Disaster Recovery?



Hello All!

I have researched this question quite a bit, but have not found a solid
answer as to why or how this would be done.

I am doing a disaster recovery test on VMs, to eliminate the part of
'dissimilar hardware' or to simulate 'Identical hardware' in real life
scenario. But I am running into some trouble while doing this, and hope that
some of you can help me out here.

Here is what I have:

A single DC that holds all FSMO roles.
I am using ntbackup to take only System State backup of the good DC. <all
paths default>

Here is what I do to restore:

Got a freshly installed 2003 standalone server.
Hooked it into a hub to get network connectivity.
Give it the same ip as my good DC
In normal mode, while logged in as local admin, ran ntbackup, and restored
the file created from orginial DC with defaults. <To original location,
create junctions> and restarted.
In normal mode, it gives an error 0xc000018e, and says to restart in DSRM.
Upon rebooting in DSRM, DC asks to activate windows, and after passing that,
when I ran ntdsutil, it does not pass file integrity.
Upon closer inspection, in Windows\NTDS, I have only ntds.dit and one log
file, when originally I am supposed to have more than that just two files.

--

Now I can't boot up into the normal mode, and I tried to do a restore second
time while being in DSRM, but that didn't help either.

I am thinking to blow away this copy and reinstall again and do ntbackup
again, but should I do the restore twice before rebooting?

I read in the list archives that while restoring, do restore to original
location once and second time to an alternate location. What is that about?


Also, would doing a back up of System State AND the whole C Drive help?


Thanks a lot in advance!




... you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone..

- Joni Mitchell


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