Performing Disaster Recovery of AD on different Hardware

Today I had to recover a Domain Controller with Active Directory, and to make it easy we could not restore to the same machine. So we took another server. Different hardware. And now? Found a whitepaper from Microsoft called "How to perform a disaster recovery restoration of Active Directory on a computer with a different hardware configuration". Works like a breeze.

Policy Reporter Tool

Alan Cuthbertson from SysPro has a utility called Policy Reporter. It reformats the log provided in %systemRoot%\Debug\UserMode to give a more meaningful display. It provides a Tree structure on the left which shows major events reported in the Log. Selecting an entry in the tree structure displays that section of the log in the view window. Policy Reporter makes it much easier to understand how Microsoft implements Policy Processing. And it's freeware! Have a look at his website and give it a try. I'm using it right now.