Performing An Authoritative Restore

By Author: kennie
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An authoritative restore occurs after a nonauthoritative restore and designates the entire MCITP certification directory, a subtree, or individual objects to be recognized as authoritative with respect to replica domain controllers in the forest. The Ntdsutil utility allows you to mark objects as authoritative so that they are propagated through replication, thereby updating existing copies of those objects throughout the forest. To authoritatively restore Active Directory, complete the following steps: 1.Perform a nonauthoritative restore as described previously. 2.Restart the computer. 3.During the phase of startup where the operating system is normally selected, press F8. 4.On the Windows Advanced Startup Options Menu, select Directory Services Restore Mode and press Enter. This ensures that the domain controller is offline and is not connected to the network. 5.At the Please Select The Operating System To Start prompt, select the appropriate Microsoft Windows Server 2003 operating system and press Enter. Log on as Administrator. 7.In the Desktop message box that warns you that Windows is running 70-620 practice test ...
... in safe mode, click OK. 8.Point to Start, then select Command Prompt. 9.At the command prompt, type ntdsutil and press Enter. 10.At the Ntdsutil prompt, type authoritative restore and press Enter. 11.At the authoritative restore prompt, do the following: To authoritatively restore the entire directory, type restore database and press Enter. To authoritatively restore a portion or subtree of the directory, such as an OU, use the OU's distinguished name, type restore subtree subtree_distinguished_name and press Enter. When you restart the computer in directory services restore mode, you must log on as an Administrator by using a valid SAM account name and password, not the Active Directory Administrator's name and password. This is because Active Directory is offline and account verification cannot occur. Rather, the SAM accounts database is used to control free Microsoft practice tests access to Active Directory while it is offline.