Restore DC in Separate Environment

[dukeminster1]

Hi All,

I've been tasked to carry out our disaster recovery plan. We backup 10 VMs reverse incrementally every night, one of which is the master domain controller with all the roles etc. We have two physical DC's outside of the virtual environment which are domain controllers. However, for this exercise, and since we will be retiring them soon (and adding another DC) I wont be trying to restore them into this test lab environment. So as I see it, my first and most important job is to restore the DC and get AD and DNS up and running.

When I restore the DC VM, It does what Veeam describe, it starts up in DSRM mode, then reboots.
I am then trying to follow this article https://www.veeam.com/kb2119 in order to restore the AD database.
I have to type "activate instance ntds" which I found in another forum.
I get to "restore database" to which it responds invalid syntax.
After a google search i have found that Microsoft have removed this function.

Where do I go from here? - I have also a valid support number and have placed a support call.
I should also add that I do not know the DRSM password which the machine was installed with. So before anything I have to boot into an admin account and reset the password using Ntdsutil.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[dukeminster1]

Also I will add that application-aware image processing is enabled...

[foggy]

Hi Dave, seems you have a single DC scenario, so first scenario described in the KB (fully automatic restore) should work for you.