My w2k3 server suddenly starts slowing down tremendously, infact it takes hours to boot up, lounching applications and other activities take a very long time to execute. client workstations also take much time to authenticate.

when i looked at the event viewer it says:
The device, \Decice\Harddisk0, has a bad block.
also the error ID says 7

the problem is that this is a domain controller (AD) and i'm worried of loosing my AD database.
how do i peacefully solve this issue?
please note, i'm not exactly sure if the bad block is the cause of it or something else.

could be a logical corruption of partition or a physical bad block.

Try this to see if its a logical problem

chkdsk c:

This will fix any logical bad blocks.


If it doesnt get sorted that way
use a seatools cd or disk [if ur harddisk is a seagate disk] and try running a scan.

If there are badblocks , time to take a backup and change the harddisk.

Do you have a raid config? If you can hot swap a drive, then do that.

Otherwise I would start digging deep into information about backing up your AD database and how to restore it to another computer.

Does the bad block error get reported a lot? Or just once. If it is reported several times, then yes it is the problem.....

Is there excessive memory use? Is there something using a lot of the processor? More info would help. Are you sure the network settings are correct on the clients and server? Possibly bad memory? You can download something to test your memory with something like memtest86+. What kind of harddrive do you have. Just about every vendor provides tools to check out the integrity of the drive.

after a number of options including chddsk /c it now improves a bit in speed . but the problem now is that i want to back up but the server simply cannot. each time i attempt to back up (while its backing up) the server suddenly shut down for reason i dont know. i'm using veritas backup ( also tried using windows built in backup.exe) the same result
whats the fix for this?

Install Smartmon tools and run the internal SMART diagnostics and then query the drive for the results. If any errors are reported replace the drive.

Go to:
http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

Scroll all the way down, and you will see the Windows version.

yeah Kimvatte, i'm now sure the real problem is bad sector. you see; i try to use GParted to copy the content of w2k3 harddisk to new harddisk and its reporting an error saying that 7 bad sectors are discovered in the w2k3 drive. and the main problem here is that GParted could not continue the hard disk copy 'cos of the bad sector.
on the other hand even if w2k3 server can boot up (and still slow), i cannot use Veritas to back up, ('cos on my observation) when the veritas initialises the back up process and goes on backing up, once it comes accross the bad sector on the disk the entire machine immediately shuts down - i've tried this over and over!
i'm just stucked now!
MY PROBLEM IS TO MOVE THE CONTENT OF THIS W2K3 DISK TO NEW DISK (using GParted or any other software), OR SUCCESFULLY BACK IT UP AND START WITH NEW DISK.
any help please?

Modern hard disks automatically detect and reallocate bad sectors to a reserved area. This is completely transparent to the OS. Only once this reserved area fills up will you even see a bad block (if not using SMART tools that is.) So by the time the OS itself reports any you're already in deep crapolla.

I'd bring up another AD domain controller on the network and transfer the operations master roles to it using the procedures here:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Window...3.mspx?pf=true

I'd then shutdown the troublesome server, remove its hard disk and install it in a workstation to begin recovering the remaining data.

I second Crito's suggestion. Everyth8ing can be replicated over to the new domain server relatively easy.

Also, just to throw this out there, http://www.petri.co.il/ad.htm has a lot of good info related to AD domain controlers.

One more tidbit, if you use dd_rescue to copy the contents of the old drive it will copy everything. It is designed with drives with errors in mind.

If you have another server what I would do is use dcpromo to promote the other one to the domain master, migrate any other services over manually, remove the disks from the old server and install new disks. KEEP the old disks in storage in case you need to recover data off of them later.

A crude way will be using dd.
U can take an entire disk to disk back-up [even if its got some bad sectors] and start off with the new disk.
But u need a hard disk of the same size [or more] and a linux system :-)
if u can get this then use dd command to rescue the server

Link for dd command usage u would need

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=362506