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  • #2084877

    Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

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    by badfish ·

    My PDC boots to the desktop but hangs there, responds to some things,(ie: chkdsk) but for all practical purposes is dead. Never loads all icons. Unable to see on network. Ran chkdsk, tried repair with ERD, no go. Tried restoring registry, no help. Restored “WINNT” folder, worked! but when rebooted goes back to dead state. Tried restoring to earlier backup, tried up to 5 weeks back, and no good after reboot. Also sometimes no worky after restore, even before rebooted. Cannot see rhyme or reason to it. I have it up on thin ice now by restoring to state of few days ago then booting without network plugged in. Then when it showed to be working properly plugged into network. Of course have not rebooted. I am thinking I need to format this partition and re-install NT. Problem is: approx. 170 printers shared on this server. Also few hundred user shares. How can I format and still keep these????

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    • #3774549

      Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      by dft3 ·

      In reply to 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.

    • #3774539

      Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      by hasse mcse/brainbench ·

      In reply to Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      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 http://www.tucows.com, might have such a shareware program.

      /Hasse

    • #3774524

      Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      by wayne.maples ·

      In reply to Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      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

    • #3774515

      Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      by sdfgsdf ·

      In reply to Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      i think the best way to handle this, assuming you have a spare server lying around, is to set it up as a BDC and insure that the user accounts have transferred. If all is well, promote it to PDC and take down the origional. If you don’t have a spareserver handy, grab a beefy workstation to temporarily handle the job, promote it, reformat and setup the origional server as a BDC, promote it and then dump the workstation, basically running through the procedure twice.

    • #3774460

      Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      by jdroland ·

      In reply to Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      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?

    • #3774446

      Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      by rwdavisjr ·

      In reply to Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      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

    • #3774444

      Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      by gicu artistu’ ·

      In reply to Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      Too many things on that machine. If don’t have other machine that you could use to install a BDC and then move the user files from there, then you could add another disk and some RAM (maybe). The problem is the NT spooler which take as much space asit can. And usually the PDC it’s used only for authentication (you could use an older machine) the rest of file and print and app server should go on different machines.

    • #3774406

      Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      by jacky chin ·

      In reply to Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      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.

    • #3775650

      Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      by harmssd ·

      In reply to Reinstalling a PDC – Print/File Server

      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.

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