Hello,
This will probably be a little long, so I am sorry in advance, but I have been working on this for hours now and can not come up with a solution.
First I will start by saying we had some power outages happen back to back today. We have 2 DNS servers, both of which are normally on a battery backup, and generator. One of these was moved to another location for maintenance, and never moved back so it was not on a battery backup. I did not know that this morning.
The first sign of an issue was a couple of staff were not able to connect to the internet, and when they restarted their computers they were not able to log onto their end client computers, and when I went to one of them I was not able to log on either. It was showing up as a problem with the domain on that end client machine, so I tried to reconnect it to the domain, and it told me that it could not locate an ADDC server to authenticate my credentials. At first I thought a switch did not come back up, because not all of our buildings have backup power. After checking all of them (took me about an 2 hours) I found that I was wrong. I went back to the computer and same problem. Evidently what happened is while the power blinked off on one domain, the other was in the middle of a scheduled restart, so neither one of them would come back up.
I have searched for a solution for a majority of the day, and now night and am still at a loss. First I tried to redirect all of the NTDSUTIL options to point back at the initial domain server (dc3). Then when, when that did not work, I tried a couple of other things in that area of the forum to try to get one of them back up and running because I felt as though that would get the other back up and running if I set them back up to look at each other. When I tried to log on the the other DC (DC4), it would not even see the network, because it is on a Hyper V machine, and the machine that it is on can not locate DC3. The DHCP is on the same Hyper V machine, on another server. The last thing I tried was to disable the reg setting to make the DC3 start up without trying to sync with the other server. I am at a loss now, and I am leaving it up to anyone who thinks they can help me.
Thanks in advance for your time, Cory R. Platt