How to fix a USN Rollback condition
a USN Rollback condition that had been caused by some virtualization work. There has been some discussion in the comments in that post about what to do when you have a single domain controller that thinks it is in a USN Rollback condition (eg has disabled outbound replication and paused the Net Logon service).
First Demote all but one DC by force if necessary and it will most likely be necessary go to the last remaining DC launch computers and users, go to domain controllers and delete there computer objects, at that point any FSMO services will be transferred to the last DC.
Logic would suggest that once a DC knows it is the only DC in the Forest that it would shake off the USN Rollback blues and start humming away normally again. Not the case unfortunately.
Apparently this fix is quite dangerous and not for the faint of heart. My heart is not the least bit faint, particularly when it comes to my VMWare test environment, so I didn’t mind testing this out. At the very least you should make sure you have a backup of the server you can go back to if this doesn’t work.
To get a single domain controller out of USN Rollback:
- Open Regedit
- Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NTDS\Parameters
- Locate the key “Dsa Not Writable”=dword:00000004
- Delete the entire key
- Enable replication by running repadmin /options servername -DISABLE_OUTBOUND_REPL and repadmin /options servername -DISABLE_INBOUND_REPL
- Reboot
Once your domain controller has rebooted you should find that NetLogon is running again and repadmin /options no longer shows replication as being disabled.