My bad day with Windows Server 2003

Today was not a good computer day. I had some good meetings (yes, actual good, productive meetings), finished a couple items on my to do list, and even got some of that good old Ikea furniture put together. The part of my job where I work with a vendor and he rolls out his software on my newly-configured domain controller and application server was not so good.

I rolled in early this morning to make a few last tweaks to the DNS settings and update some group policy objects. Everything was working just fine, as is generally the case with Server 2003 (say what you want about Microsoft, but their server products are actually pretty easy to use; Server 2003 is pretty stable, too, with regular maintenance).

However, after the vendor installed a piece of software and restarted the server, an Active Directory Service message popped up, prompting me to restart in Active Directory Recovery Mode and preventing me from logging in. I was able to log in through recovery mode (kind of like Safe Mode, only cooler), but since I was in and out of meetings, I didn't have time to actually figure out what to do with said recovery mode.

I'd love to blame the vendor and his software, but it was just Partition Magic (and he hadn't even resized anything yet). I uninstalled and reinstalled AD, but still ran into the same wall. He couldn't properly configure SQL server in recovery mode either, so he went home and I'll be blowing out Server 2003 some night this week and reinstalling. There might be a more elegant way to address the problem, but fortunately, this was a new server and I hadn't invested too much time in the AD setup yet.

I guess I'll just have to blame the Active Directory goblins. Hopefully I can wipe them out with a clean install. Too bad BudgetSense doesn't run on Linux, right?