So, one of my customers have this old server SBS 2008 (Windows 2008 NOT R2
). We will be migrating them to O365 in.. 1 week. It was scheduled since June. By the way - this was my SECOND server I installed in production. Over 10 years ago!
What happened? Power outage today morning AND UPS having issues with battery. Replacement battery on the way (though it’s an old UPS so the delivery takes a few days). Server crashed.
SYSVOL
andNETLOGON
shares missing. No Global Catalog. No server holding FSMO roles.
Users seeing network connections as private (not domain). The only server (PDC by the way) seeing its network as private as well. Active Directory not working. Exchange not working. Applications that rely on domain authentication - not working.
Because this is 2008, the only backup I have is Windows Backup. Restoring system state requires booting from OS DVD (anyone still have Windows 2008 SBS DVD #1? I do!) What’s more I was offsite and I couldn’t perform restore from backup immediately.
Fortunately backup did work - last night at 9.00 PM. So in the meantime of trying to fix this I was preparing one of my Hyper-V labs (another story to be told - StorageSpaces rocks!) and a VM to perform restore from backup - once I’ll deliver the box to the client.
It took some time, but I’ve managed to recover the server remotely without failing back to backup.
Let me just recap what was wrong and how I fixed this (I hope I WON’T NEED THIS ANYMORE!)
I can tell you this - DCDIAG is your friend!
nltest /sc_change_pwd:contoso.local
Hurray, the Users and Computers snap in started working!
net stop ntfrs
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\NtFrs\Parameters\Backup/Restore\Process at Startup
net start ntfrs
"%systemroot%\windows\sysvol\domainName"
The server is up and running. All this while helping my brother-in-law wife fix her laptop (endless bluescreen loops) due to faulty hardrive. Veeam to the rescue! (and gparted to fit 1TB hdd into 250GB SSD ) and taking care of two kids (Home Office)! Talk about multi-tasking?!
Exhausting!