I have a domain controller that suffered an unexpected shutdown during a power outage (wind storm). The server was in the process of being decomissioned and was only servicing as a DNS backup server and AD replication partner at the time of the failure. All AD roles were moved to the new SBS 2003 R2 server. Since the power outage the server has displayed "active directory rebuilding indices" upon boot and most automatic services fail to start at boot. I cannot manage the server remotely (Computer / Manage) or RDP to the server. I have tried CHkdsk /r to recover the AD coruption but have not been able to. The server has been 2 months without a replication and is close to tombstone. My goal is to get this server back in the AD for just long enough to gracefully demote the server. I do not have a backup of this server as it was not providing any significant role. Is there anything I can do to gracefully demote this server and ensure all items are properly removed from the current active directory?
This is the replication status for the following directory partition on the local domain controller.
Directory partition:
DC=DomainDnsZones,DC=domainname,DC=local
The local domain controller has not recently received replication information from a number of domain controllers. The count of domain controllers is shown, divided into the following intervals.
More than 24 hours:
1
More than a week:
1
More than one month:
1
More than two months:
1
More than a tombstone lifetime:
0
Tombstone lifetime (days):
180
Domain controllers that do not replicate in a timely manner may encounter errors. It may miss password changes and be unable to authenticate. A DC that has not replicated in a tombstone lifetime may have missed the deletion of some objects, and may be automatically blocked from future replication until it is reconciled.
To identify the domain controllers by name, install the support tools included on the installation CD and run dcdiag.exe.
You can also use the support tool repadmin.exe to display the replication latencies of the domain controllers in the forest. The command is "repadmin /showvector /latency <partition-dn>".