There comes a day in nearly every administrator’s life where they will need to boot a domain controller into DS Restore Mode. Whether it’s to perform an authoritative restore or fix database issues, you will need the local administrator password. Too often, we work with customers that have not been maintaining this password and do not have a way to get in to their DC’s. Sometimes it’s because the password was set by another admin who is not available or no longer works at the company. Other times it’s because the password was set at DC promotion years ago and no one remembers it anymore. Since the password can only be set when the DC is running in normal mode, you get a nasty chicken and the egg situation if the DC cannot start Directory Services correctly.

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