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I am in serious need of help.

I had of 2 domain controllers and one currently went down last night indefinitely. I have one DC holding up the entire domain. Kinda in a panic. Our servers are running on 2008r2. The Domain controller that went down is the current schema master and RID master. I cant find any documentation on how to seize roles when a server is dead/offline. I am hoping to seize all roles to the one last remaining domain controller and rebuild the second and transfer roles back. Has anyone experienced this type of issue?

2 Answers 2

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This TechNet article goes into great detail about how to sieze the roles.

Don't panic, the domain can function with both if those roles offline for a fairly long amount of time. Don't rush the recovery process because you're nervous. I would promote a new DC first, so that you have two in your domain, then worry about seizing the roles.

In addition to the seizure of roles, you will also need to clean up the failed DC's metadata in AD. See this Technet article for that procedure as well. You can do this after the promotion of a replacement DC and the role seizure process, so it's OK to do this last. It's important, but not as critical as the other two procedures.

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  • Thank you! that was actually very encouraging, i was in somewhat of a panic mode but those articles are very very helpful. i will get another DC in place asap. Only thing is i have to register the DNS with our netops folks, and that might not get done until monday since its a weekend.
    – disnres
    Apr 20, 2013 at 19:52
  • In that case, you can do the role seizure and metadata cleanups now. The order of these events doesn't matter much as long as it all happens.
    – MDMarra
    Apr 20, 2013 at 19:55
  • Thanks again! I am curious, how can i force the removal of a DC if it is completely dead? The forcing the removal of a domain controller article indicates that i run a dcpromo on the failing DC, but that DC is completely dead. So is the metadata cleanups essentially the same as running a dcpromo and demoting a DC?
    – disnres
    Apr 20, 2013 at 20:18
  • For more advice about what to do after a DC failure, see this question. serverfault.com/questions/122356/…
    – Nic
    Apr 20, 2013 at 20:28
  • @user170483 please read the second article more closely. It does not say to use DCPROMO. You run through the metadata cleanup process in situations like yours where you cannot use DCPROMO.
    – MDMarra
    Apr 20, 2013 at 20:44
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Also, you want to remove the orphaned AD domain controller object from your environment.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555846

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