Similar to the system registry, which is often referred to as the "heart and soul" of any local computer running Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, or Windows Server 2003 | Active Directory Emergency Recovery Similar to the system registry which is often referred to as the heart and soul of any local computer running Windows NT Windows 2000 Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 Active Directory is the heart and soul of a corporate Windows-based network. This essential network component must be available to applications and users at all times. There are other similarities between the system registry and the AD but this is the most important one. In contrast to the registry which is a local configuration database AD is a replicated database and as such it is vulnerable to the same problems that can damage any distributed database including A corrupted or invalid database schema defines the structure of the database what type of data it contains and how that data is arranged Missing DNS records Damaged or corrupted information Human errors including accidental errors of the system administrator Consequently if you have implemented AD domains in your organization it is imperative that you develop disaster-prevention and disaster-recovery procedures for your AD infrastructure. Physical AD Structure As previously mentioned in this chapter the Active Directory information which now replaces the SAM registry hive is physically stored as an on-disk database. The actual database file is called and by default it resides under oSystemRoot o ntds folder. Note On Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003 a pristine copy of the AD database is stored in the SystemRoot system32 file. This copy is used when a member server is promoted to a domain controller using the DCPromo utility. In Chapter 1 I introduced mechanisms implemented by Microsoft to ensure that changes to the system registry are consistently and successfully written and are not easily corrupted by system crashes or hard-disk problems. Since AD is a centralized registry storing all user- and computer-related information for an entire organization it would be logical to .
