Restoring Domain Controllers

 

Servers running Exchange rely on information stored in Active Directory to function correctly. If you experience problems with the domain controllers in the Windows Server 2003 domain to which your Exchange server belongs, you must repair those domain controllers immediately. If these problems occur, you might experience minor complications with your servers running Exchange, or your servers might stop functioning.

To secure the availability of the domain controllers in your Exchange organization, make sure that you have more than one domain controller in each domain of your organization. Therefore, if a single domain controller fails, the replicated Active Directory information is still available in the remaining domain controllers.

If you have multiple domain controllers and if the failure does not affect all the domain controllers in your organization, one of the simplest and most effective ways to deal with the situation is to build a new domain controller and join it to the existing domain. The required Active Directory information will be replicated from the remaining domain controllers to the new one.

If all the domain controllers in your organization are affected or if you only have one domain controller, you must restore your data from a backup. For information about how to back up a domain controller, see "Backing Up Domain Controllers."

For detailed information about how to recover a Windows Server 2003 operating system domain controller, see Active Directory Operations Guide Version 1.5.