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I got situation when administrator deleted OU named “Secred” by mistake. Location of this OU was OU=Secret,OU=PrivUsers,DC=mydomain,DC=com.

To restore it first of all we need to perform non-authoritative restore. To perform it boot your Windows server 2003 into Directory Services Restore Mode (F8 when booting server) and restore latest system state backup with OU secret in place.

Note, if you dont know DSRM password, check this article how to reset it.

After system state restore dont reboot server.

It is time to start authoritative restore. To do that open command line and type:

ntdsutil and press Enter
authoritative restore and press Enter
restore subtree “OU=Secret,OU=PrivUsers,DC=mydomain,DC=com” and press Enter

Confirm that authoritative restore should increase  version numbers when prompted and exit ntdsutil by typing quit two times. After that reboot server into normal mode.

This post will show how to create system state backup via command line. The system state backup of a domain controller includes its registry, SYSVOL, Active Directory DIT files and critical system files. To perform system state backup and save it as C:\backups\systemstate.bkf open command line on your Windows server 2003 and type:

ntbackup backup systemstate /F “C:\backups\systemstate.bkf”

This post will show how to get services list whose StartMode is set to disabled via power shell. Open power shell in Windows server 2003 or 2008 and type:

gwmi win32_service | where {$_.StartMode -eq “Disabled”}

This how to post presents you with GPInventory.exe tool used for group policy inventory and other tasks. It can be downloaded from this location .  This tool retrieves Group Policy informations and is effective for pulling out detailed system information, such as applications that have been installed, processor name and speed, or the list of installed hotfixes.

You will need Windows server 2003 or Windows 2000/XP to run this tool.

If you want to have visual picture of your active directory topology you can use Microsoft tool named “Active Directory Topology Diagrammer” which scans Active Directory information and creates Visio picture. This tool will work on Windows server 2003 and Windows XP/Vista systems. You can download it from here .

Note that you need Microsoft Office Vision 2003 or 2007 to run this tool.

How to #Tools by Thomas

This post will show you how to enable automatic updates on your Windows server 2008 Core. To do it type:

cscript scregedit.wsf /AU 4

How to change time zone in Windows server 2008 Core? It is pretty simple. You just need to start GUI with this command:

control timedate.cpl

This post will show you how to reboot Windows server 2008 Core after some changes were made. To reboot type in command line:

shutdown /r

This how to will show command which enables remote desktop administration on your Windows server 2008 Core server. Note that you`ll be presented with no GUI after remote desktop connection to Core server. Only minimal command line interface will be available for you. To enable it type:

cscript %windir%\system32\SCRegEdit.wsf /ar 0

In this post you`ll see how to change administrative password after new Windows server 2008 Core setup. For this case use net user command:

net user administrator *”

Press Enter and you`ll be prompted to enter new password

In this post you`ll see how to join your Windows server 2008 Core to domain named testdomain.com using user ID testuser. To do that type in command line:

netdom join %computername% /domain:testdomain.com /userd: testdomain.com\testuser /passwordd:*