Since a month or so ago I inherited responsibility for small network administration for my sins. The domain controller (yes there is only one, and yes I know it is best practice to have two even in a small domain setup) went down overnight and I have been trying all day to get it back up and running. Unfortunately this machine also administers our entire Active Directory setup:
- It goes through the BIOS without any errors, nothing whatsoever
- It gets into the “select safe mode, safe mode with networking, normal” etc and if you select either of the safe mode options it loads a few files then reboots. If you select normal it just runs for a bit (doesn’t get to the windows splash screen) and then reboots again.
- If you select windows repair, it asks for an image to repair too: however it would appear that none was taken that can be used (!!) or one is not being shown.
- I have tried repairing the boot sector and the boot configuration using
bootrec.exe, both which it says were completed successfully but still it doesn’t work. - I have tried swapping the drives into another server to rule out hardware and that didn’t work either so clearly it’s the OS.
- I have tried running
chkdskwhich ran fine, and also memory check which was also fine.
We do have another machine on the network that was installed as a DC so when we decommission the current infrastructure but when I try and "promote" this to the lead DC then I get “you cannot modify domain or trust information because a PDC emulator cannot be contacted" so I am unable to replicate the Active Directory details.
Best Answer
If you have an Enterprise Agreement with Software Assurance, you could take advantage of Microsoft DaRT (Diagnostics and Recovery Toolset).
DaRT is based on Windows PE, and includes a strong set of tools for troubleshooting and recovering unusable systems. It includes a registry editor, file explorer, and crash analyzer; as well as tools to restore files, repair disks, scan for viruses and more.