I Have a windows 2003 Standard 64x Edition server I setup for work that has about 15 computers connected to it. Until lately everything has been working fine. A couple of weeks I setup roaming profiles and folder redirection to enable users to roam but mainly set it up so that I would have backups of their desktops, documents etc. Well this has been working flawlessly for a couple of weeks. I thought that everything was fine. Until yesterday. I was not here when it happened but sometime around 10 AM users were getting errors that the path to their desktops were unavailable. After the third call I rushed to the office to see what was going on. The first desktop I came to had a black screen with said message displayed. Something was obviously going on with the server shares. I figured that the server was no longer online. When getting to the server room the server was stuck at "preparing network connections..." I let the boot process continue to load into the 2k3 server OS. hoping that the errors were only due to someone restarting the server. no such luck In hopes that the problem derived from my earlier folder redirection I attempted to open the GPO Editor. I was prompted with a message "The domain controller for Group Policy operations is unavailable..... you can try one of the following." Active Directory was an option that was grayed out. So now I can not access the domain controller to disable folder redirection as the Domain controller (our only one) is unavailable. The thing is all workstations are able to login to their workstations using their AD usernames and Passwords. wich leads me to think that AD is at least in part working. I currently have all workstations running by a work around. What I had to do is log that user on. browse to the domain controller my network places. upon selecting the domain controller it prompted me for a user name password. I tried using the users login info however this at first did not work. I had to use an administrator login. this enabled them to access the server just not their redirected folders. I then logged the user off of their computer and logged them back on. following the same process I then browsed to the domain controller and was again prompted for a user name and password. this time I was able to login using the users information. This loaded the users desktop and all of their redirected folders. Now That I have everyone working (on crutches) I need to fix the problem that has caused this and perhaps undo the folder redirection as it obviously is more trouble than it is worth. checking out the logs I have many errors These errors keep repeating in the Application log Event Type: Error Event Source: Userenv Event Category: None Event ID: 1006 Date: 8/26/2008 Time: 8:50:14 AM User: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM Computer: PREPOW-SERVER1 Description: Windows cannot bind to precisionpower.dom domain. (Local Error). Group Policy processing aborted. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/even... Event Type: Error Event Source: Userenv Event Category: None Event ID: 1030 Date: 8/26/2008 Time: 8:50:14 AM User: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM Computer: PREPOW-SERVER1 Description: Windows cannot query for the list of Group Policy objects. Check the event log for possible messages previously logged by the policy engine that describes the reason for this. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/even... Event Type: Error Event Source: Userenv Event Category: None Event ID: 1054 Date: 8/26/2008 Time: 7:37:31 AM User: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM Computer: PREPOW-SERVER1 Description: Windows cannot obtain the domain controller name for your computer network. (The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted. ). Group Policy processing aborted. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/even... this is the prevalent error in Director service Event Type: Error Event Source: NTDS General Event Category: Global Catalog Event ID: 1126 Date: 8/26/2008 Time: 5:15:00 AM User: NT AUTHORITY\ANONYMOUS LOGON Computer: PREPOW-SERVER1 Description: Active Directory was unable to establish a connection with the global catalog. Additional Data Error value: 1355 The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted. Internal ID: 3200cf3 User Action: Make sure a global catalog is available in the forest, and is reachable from this domain controller. You may use the nltest utility to diagnose this problem. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/even... DNS error Event Type: Error Event Source: DNS Event Category: None Event ID: 4007 Date: 8/25/2008 Time: 5:39:35 PM User: N/A Computer: PREPOW-SERVER1 Description: The DNS server was unable to open zone prepower.dom in the Active Directory from the application directory partition DomainDnsZones.prepower.dom. This DNS server is configured to obtain and use information from the directory for this zone and is unable to load the zone without it. Check that the Active Directory is functioning properly and reload the zone. The event data is the error code. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/even... Data: 0000: 0d 00 00 00 .... I have no idea what is going on. opening active directory I can see that this server is listed in domain controllers however it is not making itself available to itself or to other users on the network. San anyone enlighten me to what to do from here? I do not want to damage anything further than it is. right now I would be happy to only reverse folder redirection so that my users can log on and off without me. Thanks for reading this ridiculously long post and many thanks to any suggestions you may have.

I think the root of your problem is DNS. Without DNS, Active Directory doesn't work. I see in the last post, it is referencing prepower.dom, but in the first post its precisionpower.dom. It sounds like some configuration has gotten messes up with your DNS. I would check your DNS server configuration, and also TCP/IP configuration, to make sure that both match with what your domain should be. I cannot tell from the posts which one it is suppose to be, but there is definitely a mismatch.

The sites below explain all the event IDs and solutions. http://eventid.net/display.asp?even... http://eventid.net/display.asp?even... http://eventid.net/display.asp?even... http://eventid.net/display.asp?even... http://eventid.net/display.asp?even...

`thank you for your help I had not even noticed that it was looking for prepow.dom domain I ended up removing those entries from the registry and rebuilding the sysvol folder and everything is working again. I still have a problem editing the group policy as it tells me that I do not have permission to do so. But my users are happy so I am not in such a hurry. Thanks again for all of your help.