We've recently had a catastrophic raid failure on our servers, which were being backed up with shadow protect. After 3 days of copying I finally got our file server back in a VM. As we used a 'virtualboot' for the file server in the meantime, I effectively had two copies of the server on the network at once.
In order to copy back the files that changed, I tried to rename the file server, and change its IP address (I should also mention, the file server is a backup DC). When I renamed it, it came up with an error, so I rebooted. Now I can't login, it says "an attempt was made to logon, but the network logon service was not started"
I don't care if I have to recreate the Vm and reinstall windows, but I would like to be able to get the files off this VM. How can I get access to it?
Best Answer
Boot to Directory Services Restore Mode to log in to a DC with a non-domain account; press F8 during boot as soon as Windows starts to load.
The password for the
Administratoruser in this mode was set during the initial promotion of the domain controller, but if you've forgotten it, it can be reset with typical password reset tools for local accounts.Once you're in, you can fix whatever's needed to get the services started - my money's on networking and name resolution configuration.