twnukowski

Funny you mention this, I actually had this happen to me. I inherited a mess from the previous IT admin at our company. All of our DC's were running on desktops!! (small office, 15 people). I was having some AD replication issues and one of the suggest fixes was to try rebooting the server in question. So, I reboot said server. I immediately found out why we were having replication issues, the drive was dying! No RAID, at all. The server would not come back, it was BSOD'ing right after the boot process started. This basically brought the whole network to it's knees. No Authentication, which means no Exchange, etc. I ended up seizing the roles and transferring them to another DC. We were only down about 30 minutes, but that was scary as hell. People act really wierd when they have no email. It's like they are lost... angry and lost. I also invested in Backup Exec System Recovery 8. It can take full and incremental images of the servers, with the added capability for restoring to virtual PC, VM Ware or disimilar hardware. So the short answer is: Always have more than one DC per domain/forest, Sieze the roles, and backup early and often. Oh yeah, make sure you have more than 1 Global Catalog. I'm not positive, but I don't think those roles can reside in both places. I'm just a rookie, so I'd love to hear that I'm incorrect. Tom

I am having this exact same problem! I've tried dropping all customizations except the unattended stuff, no success. Thats next to go. What else have you tried?