Using NTDSUTIL Metada Cleanup to Remove a Failed/Offline Domain Controller Object.

https://chinnychukwudozie.com/2014/01/27/using-ntdsutil-metada-cleanup-to-remove-a-failedoffline-domain-controller-object/ 

 In this post, I would like to talk about using the ntdsutil utility for metadata cleanup. A domain controller failure ‘DC00’ recently occurred in my lab. Running the  repadmin /replsum  command confirmed a replication error and showed DC00 as unavailable: 

 

 Since a dcpromo was obviously out of the question, I used the Ntdsutil metadata cleanup command to effect the removal in the following steps. 

 Start the Ntdsutil Tool: 

 Open a command prompt as an administrator. At the prompt, type ntdsutil and press enter. This put me directly in the ntdsutil mode. Entering ‘help’ shows all the options directly available : 

 

 At the Ntdsutil prompt, select and type  metadata cleanup  command and press enter. 

 At the metadata cleanup prompt, type  connections  and press enter. 

 At the server connections prompt, type  connect to server ws2012r2  and press enter. Where ws2012r2 is a domain controller dns name. 

 After connecting to the domain controller, type quit at the server connections prompt to exit out to the  metadata cleanup  prompt. 

 Now at the  metadata cleanup  prompt, type  select operation target  and press enter. Entering this mode, will enable me select the sites, domains and servers I intend to work with. 

 

 

 From the help options available at  select operation target , select, and type  list domains . Press enter. 

 At the  select operation target  type  select domain 0 . Where domain 0 is the intended domain. 

 At the next  select operation target  prompt, type list sites and press enter. 

 At the next  select operation target  prompt, type  select site 0  and press enter. 

 At the next  select operation target  prompt, type  list servers in site  and press enter. 

 At the next  select operation target  prompt, type  select server 1  where server 1 is the offline domain controller object I intend to remove. Press enter. 

 At the next  select operation target  prompt, type  quit  to exit out to the  metadata cleanup  prompt. 

 At the next  metadata cleanup  prompt, type  Remove selected server . 

 

 

 

 At the ‘Server Remove Confirmation Dialog’, click yes to remove the failed Domain Controller server object.After the removal is successful, I exit out of the  ntdsutil  tool by typing  quit  all the way up. I ran the  repadmin /replsummary  command again to verify and the result shows no replication errors. 

 

 I still had to go into the DNS forward lookup and reverse lookup zones to manually remove references to the offline domain controller object.I hope this helps.