Reinstalling a PDC - Print/File Server

It sounds like you've got your backups in place the way they should be, so I don't see a problem with you formatting and reinstalling everything.

You can simply restore everything to the state that they were once you've recovered all of the data.

Hi!

I hope you have a BDC if not I suggest getting one and installing would be a good thing to do now.

When it comes to saving the shared printers and userdirs, either search up a shareware utility that can export them for you or take one of the printers and search for it in the registry, when you find it you will probably find rest of printers too, then you can just export all keys to a reg file.

Same can be done for user shares.

I'm not sure, but www.tucows.com, might have such a shareware program.

/Hasse

Windows NT Server Resource Kit Supplement 3 or later includes printmig.exe utility that will give you the capability to backup and restore printer and print queue definitions from one NT 4.0 server to another. The print migration utility backs up all print queues, printer ports, print drivers,
and printer shares in cabinet file format to the file:

<%Systemroot%>\System32\Spool\Pm\pm.cab

Printmig saves the current print server status to a file named pm.log in the same directory. Taken from my tip http://is-it-true.org/nt/atips/atips289.shtml
-Wayne

I've seen similar symptoms on servers with old/bad/corrupted NIC drivers. If memory serves, most of them were Intel NIC's that were running off the NT SP drivers instead of the Vendors drivers. I've always had good luck with the Vendors drivers rather than the MS ones.

I'm sure you've beaten yourself to death thinking about what was done to the server in the days before the server got sick?

First - re-apply your latest service pack
Second - If that doesn't work remove all your networking, protocols and adapters. Reboot and reinstall networking. Then apply your latest service pack.
Third - If that doesn't work, then create a BDC and promote it to PDC. Migrate your print queues to the new PDC using the printmig program from the reskit. Now you can format your old BDC.

I know this doesn't address your user shares but a restore from tape will handle that.

ralph

If u do hv. some BDCs around, properly u need to promote the BDC -> PDC first. This is to assign all the logon validation workload to the new temporary PDC. Then take the c:\ or OS drive harddisk out fr. the original PDC and put it into the one of the NT Server/Workstation (e.g. as d:\drive) 4 repair. 1st. of all, u need to run this 'chkdsk /f' on the hd. that u want repair. Then, 2nd. of course u need to copy the latest ERD and all the registry from the hd as following,
for ERD(systemroot\repair\...) and
for system registry(systemroot\system32\config\...).
Last, delete all the tmp files fr. 'temp', 'systemroot\system32\spool\printers' folders and others unnecessary files. Put the hd. back to the original PDC and reboot, if the same thing happen again. Now, u can format the hd. and reinstall the NT Server again. After all, restore back all ur. previous NT setting from those ERD and system registry u've backup. I hope this can help u. Let me know if u need any helps.

Before you format, I would try a reinstall/upgrade. Then load atleast sp-5. Once you are up put your user shares on to a member server and move the printers to a member server.
If that does not work, promote your BDC if you have one, if not get one!! Move your shares and printers over to a member server. Then format and start over with the PDC.