Where’s my GC?
Another real-life experience when I encountered missing GC due to corrupt DC. This was suspected to happen because before the corrupt DC went offline, replication to other GC has not taken place, and this has caused Exchange Server could not find any valid GC (…yes, Exchange Server 2000 involved in this scenario). Here’s what can be done to those who have encounter the same incident. After a lot of google taken place, here’s what I can share:
Use NTDSUTIL, a command-line tool to manage AD, and in this case, we’re using this tool to perform metadata cleanup.
Check DNS to see any entry of GC and make sure that the primary DNS zone(s) is set to AD-Integrated and all other online server(s) DNS properties (under NIC TCP/IP properties) is set to register in DNS.
Point the 2nd DC (or other DCs) to the primary DNS and restart their Netlogon service. You may change this DNS setting later to point at itself for those DCs but make sure that its DNS is set to AD-Integrated. Give it some time before repointing DNS.
Hope that would help on missing GC… Leave a comment if you have more better solution 