How to recover domain when the primary domain controller failes and there are member domain controllers

Today I had some problems in our development environment. After crash of Windows 2008 R2 PDC, the "backup DC" (I know - my terminology isn't valid :) ) also "refused to cooperate". After some googling I found nice solution of our problem:


http://geekswithblogs.net/mhamilton/archive/2007/04/15/111674.aspx


Unfortunatelly cited solution has some errors, so below you have fixes version. In short:.

Open a CMD prompt on the backup DC you want to perform this on. At the command-line prompt, type Ntdsutil and press <Enter>.

Microsoft Windows [Version 5.2.3790]
(C) Copyright 1985-2003 Microsoft Corp.

C:\WINDOWS>ntdsutil
ntdsutil:

At this prompt, type roles and press <Enter>:

ntdsutil: roles
fsmo maintenance:
Now type connections and press <Enter>:

fsmo maintenance: connections
server connections:

Now type connect to server <serverName> where <serverName> is the name of the backup DC you are working on, and press <Enter>:

server connections: connect to server win2008-ad

Connected to win2008-ad using credentials of locally logged on user.

server connections:

At the server connections prompt type q and press <Enter>:

server connections: q
fsmo maintenance:

Now we are going to SEIZE the FSMO roles we want. NOTE: Out of the 5 FSMO roles, we are NOT going to seize the Infrastructure Master. We do not want to put the Infrastructure Master (IM) role on the same domain controller as the Global Catalog server. If the Infrastructure Master runs on a GC server it will stop updating object information because it does not contain any references to objects that it does not hold. This is because a GC server holds a partial replica of every object in the forest. For now, we'll seize the following:

Seize domain naming master
Seize PDC
Seize RID master
Seize schema master

My warning: If crashed DC was Infrastructure master you should also run:
Seize infrastructur master 

You have run this command before Seize schema master.

 

Have a nice day