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Veeam Backup and Replication

Microsoft Windows Server booting to Safe Mode and Directory Services Restore mode with Veeam Backup

The domain controller is booting to directory services restore mode.

Running Veeam Backup and Replication, a Microsoft Windows Server Domain Controller may boot in to safe mode and directory services restore mode.

About a week ago, I loaded up Veeam Backup and Replication in to my test environment. It’s a fantastic product, and it’s working great, however today I had a little bit of an issue with a DC running Windows Server 2016 Server Core.

I woke up to a notification that the backup failed due to a VSS snapshot issue. Now I know that VSS can be a little picky at times, so I decided to restart the guest VM. Upon restarting, she came back up, was pingable, and appeared to be running fine, however the backup kept failing with new errors, the event log was looking very strange on the server, and numerous services that were set to automatic were not starting up.

This specific server was installed using Server Core mode, so it has no GUI and is administered via command prompt over RDP, or via remote management utilities. Once RDP’ing in to the server, I noticed the “Safe Mode” branding on each corner of the display, this was very odd. I restarted the server again, this time manually trying to start Active Directory Services manually via services.msc.

This presented:

Event ID: 16652
Source: Directory-Services-SAM
General Description: The domain controller is booting to directory services restore mode.

Screenshot:

The domain controller is booting to directory services restore mode.

 

This surprised me (and scared me for that matter). I immediately started searching the internet to find out what would have caused this…

To my relief, I read numerous sites that advise that when an active backup is running on a guest VM which is a domain controller, Veeam activates directory services restore mode temporarily, so in the event of a restore, it will boot to this mode automatically. In my case, the switch was not changed back during the backup failure.

Running the following command in a command prompt, verifies that the safeboot switch is set to dsrepair enabled:

bcdedit /v

To disable directory services restore mode, type the following in a command prompt:

bcdedit /deletevalue safeboot

Restart the server and the issue should be resolved!

Stephen Wagner

Stephen Wagner is President of Digitally Accurate Inc., an IT Consulting, IT Services and IT Solutions company. Stephen Wagner is also a VMware vExpert, NVIDIA NGCA Advisor, and HPE Influencer, and also specializes in a number of technologies including Virtualization and VDI.

View Comments

  • Had this after removing a drive from a server to check it's SMART status. Later, had this again when restoring from a veeam backup. Thanks for saving the day!!

  • You Learn Something New every Day..

    Thanks as this was my exact issue encountered :)

  • Thank you very much. I was going to restore the DC before I looked for some more Information, and saw your article which saved me time and trouble.

  • Thank you very much. You saved me from a stupied mistake I made. I could not understand why it was restarting to safe mode every time after I restored the DC from a backup.

  • Saved my bacon too. However, this was on a physical 2016 server.

    Any posts on why this happened?

    I've been getting good backups for over a week on this server with no issues.

  • Nice! Mine was on a 2012r2 VM DC. The Veeam backup failed and while checking for the usual VSS errors I noticed solid ADWS 1202 errors. Restarted and it went into Safe Mode! Great post. Retry backup and all good. Just wonder why it failed to begin with.

  • You saved my life too some years ago. I came back in 2020 ... then i remembered how that post was usefull.

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Published by
Stephen Wagner
6 years ago

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