Death of a Domain Controller

My home network has just a single domain controller on it. This domain controller runs a few other servers such as spam checking email and so on.

A few weeks back when the server was started it would always do a disk check but it would never find any problems so as a precaution I backed up the system state data - I don't use two domain controllers because I just don't see the need for it on a small home network.

Good thing I took the backup as the server decided it had had enough and blue screened with 'INACCESSIBLE BOOT DEVICE'.

At first I thought the fix would be simple enough, Just build a new Windows 2000 Domain controller because the original was windows 2000 and run DCPROMO /ADV to restore but Windows 2000 Active Directory doesn't support it then I hit upon the idea of building a Windows 2003 domain controller and running DCPROMO /ADV but I don't know if it will be able to restore a Windows 2000 Active Directory database to Windows 2003 - Something I will test very soon.

The safest option and the one I'm following is to build a Windows 2000 server and drop it it into Active Directory Services restore mode and then restore the system state from backup and THEN DCPromo the new windows 2003 server.