Help...Windows domain issue

Factual Questions
1

I’m having an issue with a Windows 2003 domain and thought I might ask here. What happened is that one of the Windows domain controllers had it’s NIC die last week. The NIC was replaced on Friday and I flew out here to work on the system and get it back up and running. The DC that died was also the primary DNS and WINS server for the domain. I had the customer switch over DNS and WINS to one of the other DCs before I got out here, but the domain doesn’t seem to be working. Basically what’s happening is that the system is asking you to re-authenticate to bring up network shares when the secondary DC is up but the primary DC that had the NIC issue is down. However, if you bring up the old primary DC the system works fine. This goes for workstations and non-DC domain servers both. If I’m on the secondary DC I can hit shares with no problem. However, if I’m on a non-DC server or a workstation and I try to hit the same shares it pops up an authentication prompt…almost like it’s not connected to the domain.

My guess is there is something wrong with the trust relationship, but I’m not really a Windows guy. I can obviously ‘fix’ this by simply bringing the now repaired DC up…doing that makes everything work. But it’s not really fixing the underlying issue, and I don’t trust this server to be stable (it’s had a series of hardware problems over the last year or so). So, any advice on how I can either re-establish the trust relationship or whatever might be wrong would be greatly appreciated. I’d LOVE to get home tonight.

-XT

2

Just as a brief update, I tried to change the FSMO roles but kept getting (to paraphrase since I didn’t write it down) ‘the FSMO server could not be contacted’ when I tried to either seize or transfer roles to the unaffected server from the DC that had the bad NIC. I tried some other stuff as well, but none of it worked, so I went with the nuclear option and am in the process of using dcpromo to remove AD from that server. I’ll then try to use dcpromo to put it back on and hopefully after that I’ll be able to change the FSMO roles. That’s the theory at this point anyway.

-XT