We have an AD forest with one domain and 17 2008R2 DC's. We recently had a system partition fail on an important DC that was also doing some file and application serving. We'd been using Arcserve backups and also doing a Windows Server backup of the system volume and System State.
When attempting a recovery, I ran into a Microsoft article (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/249694) that states that "If there are other healthy domain controllers online for the domain, we recommend that you do not perform a restore at all. Instead, perform a new installation of Windows on the destination computer and run the Active Directory Installation Wizard (Dcpromo.exe), to make the installation a replica in an existing domain."
Can you tell me whether there is currently a Microsoft-approved procedure to restore a DC's system drive (with programs, registry setttings, etc., that would be lost with a new install)? Or is a fresh installation and reinstallation and reconfiguration of settings and programs followed by DCPromo the only official way?