SERVER 2012 DC - Would you have recovered this way?

[burgemaster]

Hi all,

 

We had a power outage and one of our hyper-v DCs did not shut down gracefully. When rebooted it was presenting with the DC in a loop with error "0xc00002e2"

On reading up on this M$ approach was to remove DC and start over. There were several other fixes that some people have had success with, but they didn't seem to apply to me.

Domain controller does not start, c00002e2 error occurs, or "Choose an option" is displayed

 

I couldn't recover from a backup as we had no snapshots (removed as we ran out of space last week) and the nightly backup was a backup of the Dc in a failed state!

 

What I did:

Seize all the roles onto the 2nd server 2012 DC

Shift F8 and load into DSRM mode.

Export DHCP to a file, setup DHCP on the 2nd DC and import the export.

Remove Directory Services from the failed DC

Reboot server normally into windows.

DCPROMO to remove the dead DC

Setup a brand new domain controller

Promote DC

Setup DNS/DHCP

Share the roles.

check backups

check backups again

 

Would anyone have done anything differently? I could have promoted the recovered DC again maybe but thought it better to start fresh?

 

Thanks in advance

[FN-GM]

I would have done that without attempting a restore from a backup. Apart from that all is good.

[walkd]

Something you may or may not be aware of, but this may have prevented the issue Keeping your Virtual Active Directory Domain Controllers Safe

[apeman]

I wouldn't have bothered booting it back up either, i would of gone straight for the format/reinstall. In windows 2008 and above if you remove the failed DC from AD users and computer it will do all the necessary clean up for you

 

I would also look into DHCP Failover in 2012, its working very well for us here. We have about 120 scopes and 2000 devices daily, everything is constantly mirrored between the failover pair and if one of the pair fails no one is the wiser

[burgemaster]

Thanks for the replies. Glad I didn't waste time!!

Dhcp I will definetly install on both DCs as suggested.!

[Firefox]

Seems like you got it pretty much covered, 9 times out of 10 it's quicker to start over.

 

However 1 point you noted, you couldn't restore from a snapshot as you had run out of room and had to remove them.....NEVER restore a DC from snapshot...it's very much against MS good practice as there is a very good chance you'd end up with AD corruption

[Modey]

However 1 point you noted, you couldn't restore from a snapshot as you had run out of room and had to remove them.....NEVER restore a DC from snapshot...it's very much against MS good practice as there is a very good chance you'd end up with AD corruption

 

It's a supported feature in Server 2012.