I’ll just sum this one up, as it’s pretty boring, but there are some important details.
1) Computer account for a Domain Controller/Global Catalogue/Exchange server (virtualized in Hyper-V) becomes corrupt, including the underlying metadata.
2) That server cannot ‘see’ the domain, with numerous errors from both Exchange and the Event Viewer stating that it cannot replicate due to DNS problems.
3) Rolling the .vhd back to a previous week results in the same issue.
4) When attempting to demote/dejoin/join/promote the server from/to the domain, the computer account is deleted, but not the metadata, and the server cannot be joined to the domain again.
Solution? Backup the Mailbox Databases from the First and Second Storage Groups, as well as their transaction logs, then create a new .vhd, reinstall the OS, join it to the domain, add the newly created computer account to the ‘Exchange Server’ and ‘Exchange Install Domain Servers’ groups, install Exchange using “setup.com /m:recoverserver” (make sure that you’ve manually installed the prerequisites, such as IIS+IIS 6 Management Console, etc… before doing this), then copy the Mailbox databases back to the default install location. After that, correct the permissions on the Mailbox folder if needed (simply inherit the permissions from the parent object) and reboot the server. When it finishes booting, open the Exchange Management Console and mount the Storage Groups (note: you may have to open the properties on both groups and uncheck the option that prevents Exchange from automatically mounting the databases on boot).
Simple, right?
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