Windows DC boots to mouse cursor then reboots

We recenlty had a client phone us in a panic there Domain Controller would not boot, instead it was in an endless loop where the system would boot to a black screen with the mouse cursor and the automatically reboot.

After investigating the cause of the issue we managed to ascertain that the Active Directory had become corrupt for some reason and needed to be repaired.

While we did have backups of the server we tried to see if there was not a quicker way to get the server operational and decided to do a scan and repair to the Active Directory database files.

If you are experiencing the same issues maybe this will help you, but remember that backups are still your best friend as this method is not always guaranteed to work and mileage may vary.

The first step is to get the server into Directory Services Restore Mode to do this press F8 as the server starts to boot, once the boot menu is displayed select Directory Services Restore Mode (For this you will need a LOCAL administrator account).

Once the server has booted into DSRM mode do the following steps

• Log in with your local admin account
• Go to the command prompt and enter the following commands

  • cd /d “c:\windows\system32”

  • NTDSUTIL

  • activate instance NTDS

  • files

    • If you encounter an error stating that the Jet engine could not be initialized exit out of ntdsutil.

  • cd\

  • md DSRMBackup

  • cd \windows\ntds

  • copy ntds.dit c:\DSRMBackup

  • cd \windows\system32

  • esentutl /g c:\windows\ntds\ntds.dit

    • This will perform an integrity check

  • esentutl /p c:\windows\ntds\ntds.dit

    • Agree with the prompt

  • cd \windows\ntds

  • move *.log c:\DSRMBackup

    • This should complete the repair. To verify that the repair has worked successfully

  • cd \windows\system32

  • ntdsutil

  • activate instance ntds

  • files

    • you should no longer get an error when you do this

  • info

    • file info should now appear correctly

  • ntdsutil

  • Semantic Database Analysis

  • Go

Once all the above steps are complete you can reboot the server and it should boot into the operating system and allow normal operation of the server and it’s services

• Tags: Active Directory, Windows Server