Question : Problem: Disaster recovery of Active Directory in SBS 2003 on new hardware platform

I am working with a failed server that was utilizing SBS 2003 and mirrored drives. The old server experienced a catastrophic failure and as a result corrupted the mirrored array. Utilizing HDD recovery software, I am able to pull the System State information from the old server as well as many of the files.

I have a new server with entirely different hardware that I have installed SBS 2003 on using the clients original software CD's. The OS is installed, the machine name is the same as the old server and all of the domain information is the same.

Can I pull the Active Directory information from the salvaged files and import the data to the new server? Will this allow all of the existing workstations to log in as they did prior to the failure using the existing user ID's and computer names?

I understand that I need to reinstall programs and data files, and I'm not concerned with that aspect, but I would like to save time with the AD component if at all possible so that I don't have to recreate all of the users and computer accounts.

Answer : Problem: Disaster recovery of Active Directory in SBS 2003 on new hardware platform

I was not able to get any of these solutions to work for me.

While I had a recovery file from their old hard drive, they did not have an actual backup of the System State.

Since this was for a smaller office, I simply rebuilt the domain and then re-added the users and computers to the domain.

I appreciate the suggestions from those of you that replied, but they just didn't work in this instance.