How to Perform a Normal Restore

To perform a primary restore, you must be a member of the Administrators group on the local computer, or you must have been delegated the appropriate permissions. If the computer is in a domain, members of the Domain Admins group can perform this procedure.
To perform a primary restore of Active Directory, perform the following steps:
1. Restart your domain controller in Directory Services Restore Mode.
2. Start the Backup utility.
3. On the Welcome to the Backup or Restore Wizard page, click Advanced Mode.
4. On the Welcome to Backup Utility Advanced Mode page, on the Restore and Manage Media tab, select what you want to restore, and then click Start Restore.
5. In the Warning dialog box, click OK.
6. In the Confirm Restore dialog box, click Advanced.
7. In the Advanced Restore Options dialog box, click When restoring replicated data sets, mark the restored data as the primary data for all replicas, and then click OK twice. Important Selecting this option ensures that the File Replication Service (FRS) data is
replicated to the other servers. Select this option only when you want to restore the first replica set to the network.
8. In the Restore Progress dialog box, click Close.
9. In the Backup Utility dialog box, click Yes.
Warning
When you restore the system state data, the Backup utility erases the system state data that is on your computer and replaces it with the system state data that you are restoring, including system state data that is not related to Active Directory. Depending on how old the system state data is, you may lose configuration changes that you recently made to the computer. To minimize this risk, back up the system state data regularly.
How to Perform an Authoritative Restore
Unlike a normal restore, an authoritative restore requires the use of a separate command-line tool, Ntdsutil. No backup utilities, including the Windows Server 2003 system utilities, can perform an authoritative restore.
To perform an authoritative restore, perform the following steps:
1. Restart your domain controller in Directory Services Restore Mode.
2. Restore Active Directory to its original location.
3. If you must perform an authoritative restore on the SYSVOL folder, restore Active Directory to an alternate location by using the Backup utility, but do not restart the computer when prompted after the restore. If you are not performing an authoritative restore on SYSVOL, skip to step 4.
4. At the command prompt, run Ntdsutil.exe.
5. At the ntdsutil prompt, type authoritative restore.
6. At the authoritative restore prompt, type .restore subtree distinguished_name_of_object (where distinguished_name_of_object is the distinguished name, or path, to the object). For example, to restore an organizational unit called Sales, which existed directly below the domain called contoso.msft, type .restore subtree OU=Sales,DC=contoso,DC=msft.
7. Type quit and then press ENTER.
8. Type quit again, and then press ENTER to exit ntdsutil.
9. Restart the domain controller.
10. After FRS publishes the SYSVOL folder, copy the SYSVOL folder and only those Group Policy folders that correspond to the restored Group Policy objects from the alternate location to the existing locations.
To verify that the copy operation was successful, examine the contents of the SYSVOL\Domain folder, where Domain is the name of the domain.