Restore broken Win2k server DC

hardware_failure

hardware_failure

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 21, 2008
Messages
1,411
I have a win2k server that took a dump after a massive power failure.

It has 2 mirrored system drives, upon booting with them I get the win2k splash screen, it appears to "almost" boot but then gets:

***STOP 0x0000007B ..........
INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

It does this on both of the drives when they are solo. The person that owns this apparently does not have any backups of system states etc. The RAID with the data appears to be intact. (physically at least)

Anyone have any suggestions? I have the original win2k server disc but Im worried about doing a normal restore because its a DC.

Thanks for any feedback.
 
Before you do anything, use either a BartPE disk or GetDataBackNTFS to pull ALL data off the drives. After that:

-What is the model of the server? Get the manufacture diag tools and loop a few HDD tests to see if they come up clean.
 
The server is a custom build on a supermicro MB. Doing more research now.

I am also pulling data with GetDataBackNTFS right now, thank you VERY much for the tips!
 
The error is pretty self explanatory: Windows is booting up and can't find the boot device. In a new build, I would suggest that the mass storage controller isn't loaded. In an existing build, I would look at the hard drive for corruption.

What type of RAID are you running? If it's a mirror, then I would look at hard drive controller failure. If it's a stripe, then one of your drives most likely started to fail and generated some corruption.

Assuming the driver is corrupt, you may be able to identify the driver files and copy them back down to the system.

If it's the only domain controller... be very careful with the data on that machine!
 
Its not the only DC. (thank goodness)

The raid is a raid 5 on a separate PCI 3ware card.

The system drives are ide drives plugged into ide 0 and 1 of the MB.

Because they are both windows dynamic drives, partition copying programs are having a hard time seeing them.

It does seem that both of the mirrored boot drives are corrupted. One boots farther than the other, but both end up with the same blue screen.

At this point I dont care about it being a DC, but Ive read its a headache to remove it as such.

This server runs a large document imaging system via SQL server. The database/images are on the raid, but the sql setup, install etc is on the system drives.
 
Sorry forgot to mention the raid is a raid 5 with 1 hot spare. The dives that boot are not on the raid controller (on the mb)
 
Sorry to not clarify more.

The system boot setup is a RAID1... software raid in windows - 2 mirrored dynamic disks.
 
You might try booting from a live CD or something similar with just the one disk attached that boots furthest and run a chkdsk. If you are really lucky, its a correctable file system error causing the boot issue.
 
Please post back if you find anything that works saving that data, but IMO, you won't. It's been a few years, but IIRC, this is the tutorial I used twice to clean up AD after a dead 2k DC

CLICK ME
 
Since the pair of drives for the system are mirrored..I'd take one (keep the other for untouched image)...slave it to another machine..and run checkdisk on it.

We had a similar issue on a clients server last year...RAID 1...totally tanked..neither drive would boot up solo....ended up taking 1 and using NTFS for DOS (utility included in UBCD) on it with it's checkdisk utility..got it back and running for a few days in order to properly move everything off of it.
 
I apologize for not following up earlier, its been quite an insane week.

I could not get either disk to boot. I took the better of the 2, changed it to a standard disk and then copied its partition to a brand new drive.

I then reinstalled server 2k over the top of it. I didnt see a "repair install" option like I've seen and used with XP.

I had to reinstall a few drivers, reinstall SQL server 2005, remount the 30GB SQL database that was on the RAID 5 and had the vendor walk me thu reinstalling the host software that uses the SQL database.

It was important to keep this machine with the same computer name, so I had to follow the steps at this KB to douche it both as a DC and computer from the domain:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216498

Surprisingly, the steps in the MS article worked well. I was able to completely clear the machine from the network. It took some extra steps in in the DNS .msc that weren't documented there but it was all pretty basic stuff.

In short, I have to use ntdsutil to do some metadata cleanup to remove it as a DC, then had to install the support tools from the win2k server CD to get adsiedit.msc which was used to remove it from all the OU's.

So.. I was able to keep the data on the drive but totally cleared it as a DC and had to reinstall some things.

Thank you all for the great replies. This is the kind of stuff that becomes a good learning exp (minus all the stress from angry customers heh)
 
Really? I thought we were the only shop stillrunning Win 2000 server...

I recently had a 2K server with this issue, similar config also had sql 2000...
I was able to get it booting by using a 2000 floppy... yes... i had to create a boot disk for windows 2000 on a floppy drive...
That worked...

It died earlier today...
Now in the process of restoring teh server and copying the data off...
This is the 3rd Server 2000 machine to take a dive in the past 2 months... For the other two previous servers, I just broke the raid and copied the data off, and then rebuilt the server in a vm on 2003...

Fortunately, I just got approval to pick up some new hardware...
Now I have to figure out how to virtualize all the webapps we have...
and what to do with SQL server...
 
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