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I'm trying to restore from an old GPO backup for which the OS installation no longer exists, but I'm not having much luck.

Some things have changed for the new installation:

  1. The NETBIOS name (was SERVER2, is now SERVER3)
  2. The GPO itself (was Default Domain Policy, is now Custom Domain Policy)
  3. The OS version (was Server 2012 RTM, is now Server 2012 R2)

But no available backups are showing in the list when I run the Restore Wizard:

No backups found

How do I go about restoring the settings from the old PDC, now that it no longer exists?

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  • I'm not understanding the question. This is a new AD domain and a new DC and you want to restore a GPO that was backed up in a different AD domain from a different DC?
    – joeqwerty
    Jun 4, 2016 at 0:42
  • @joeqwerty: Yes, that's correct. I did a clean install of 2012 R2 and used a different machine name this time. I was also editing the Default Policy at the time, but I've ceased that practice with the new install. The old 2012 RTM install no longer exists—I'd counted on an easy GPO restore, but apparently it's not so easy after all.
    – InteXX
    Jun 4, 2016 at 2:04
  • Why would the GPO backups that you created on the DC in another AD domain be available in the new AD domain, especially seeing as you've wiped the original DC and rebuilt it? Am I still not understanding what you've done and are trying to do?
    – joeqwerty
    Jun 4, 2016 at 2:10
  • @joeqwerty: I'd done a lot of customization in that old GPO; manually spelunking through the old XML and recreating each individual setting by hand in the new AD isn't a task I'm looking forward to. I'd like to restore those old settings into the new AD domain.
    – InteXX
    Jun 4, 2016 at 2:32

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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you wont be able to restore the previously backed up GPO. What you need to do is create an new empty GPO and then right click it and choose to Import settings. then point at the backup GPO on the local file system. GPOs have a close relationship to the domain in which they were created so for example if you had a dev forest and a production forest and wanted to move a GPO from one to the other you would backup the GPO in the dev forest, move the files to the production forest, create an new empty GPO and import the settings in. this is essentially what you are trying to do.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc785343(v=ws.10).aspx

EDIT:

Windows Server 2003 content has been archived, so here's a snapshot of the original article.

http://web.archive.org/web/20140210111003/http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc785343(v=ws.10).aspx

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