Full Restore for DC with NetBackup

I was doing some disaster recovery testing for Windows 2008 R2 domain controllers today with Veritas NetBackup. I’m running through and documenting some scenarios in a test environment. Better to document the steps before you need them!

Doing a non-authoritative and an authoritative restore went well by restoring the system state. Next up on my list was a full server restore.

The documentation for a full server restore was (to be kind) a bit fuzzy. The best of their articles I could find was this one:

• https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.TECH56473

At a high level, the instructions are:

• Install and OS with the NetBackup client software.
• Restore the drives (and don’t reboot yet)
• Restore the system state
• Reboot

My problem was that after the reboot I got a blue screen. After stopping the blue screen long enough to see the error, I saw this:

STOP: c00002e2 Directory Services could not start because of the following error:
The specified procedure could not be found
Error status: 0xc000007a

I did some searching and found lots of references to a corrupt AD database and fixing it by removing log files or doing a manual repair on the ntds.dit file. Just for kicks, I did try these because they were fast and easy, but not the answer.

This link from Microsoft gave me the hint I needed:

• https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/2737463/domain-controller-does-not-start,-c00002e2-error-occurs,-or-choose-an-option-is-displayed

This link indicates that the error occurs when the Active Directory Domain Services role is removed before a domain controller is demoted. Basically, you have lobotomized DC that doesn’t have all the files anymore but is still trying to run the services. I tried to run ntdsutil and the file wasn’t there. That was a good hint that some files for AD DS were not there.

To fix my process, I installed the AD DS and DNS server roles before I did the restore. By doing those, all was good.