Alright, this is my first post here and I didn’t see any sticky topics or anything that outlined specifics when posting so just point me in the right direction if I miss anything please.
I work for a small company that can not justify a BDC, so we have a PDC (Server 2003) that handles a lot of tasks. Obviously Active Directory is hosted here (hence DNS as well), DHCP, Shared Drives with a variety of permissions, and whatnot. Server is running RAID 5 if that throws any kinks into the problem, I’m not sure.
We have run out of space on the system drive, and although you can use partitioning software to adjust sizes, I have heard horror stories that in some cases adjusting partition sizes to avoid rebuilding the system creates hiccups if the server ever crashes and you try and to use automated system recovery from tapes, etc.
So, the best solution as far as I can tell for long term, is to rebuild the server, re-install Server 2003 and then load everything back in. I do not however want to lose all the configurations. We run full backups nightly and we have automated system recovery disks and tapes but some sites seem to imply that automated system recovery even resets your partitions for you, etc.
Basically I have a situation where I configured the entire server myself, so I know all the happenings, but I have never had to actually start over and end up with the old data fully recovered including Active Directory, etc so that domain settings are recovered. Since there is no secondary server, I won’t know if I have all the data backed up the way I need it to be until the rebuild has begun and well, I find that a bit scary.
Any sites, advise, knowledge that could help me out so I know that when I bring the system back up, I will have an exported Active Directory or something that can be loaded back in and nobody would know anything even happened from a user’s perspective? Any other data / PDC tasks I should be concerned about?
I suspect backing up the system state would grab all the data I need, but confirmation would make me feel better, and also, do I just rebuild with new partition sizes, then restore System State from the tape?
Thanks in advance for any input.