Well, despite having my Domain Controller's hard drive go south last night, I'm back up and running!

I scurried down to the local computer store this afternoon and picked me up a brand new 160 GB drive (oh, and I also grabbed a 250 GB, 16MB Cache drive along with it).  This time I also got a 2 year warranty with them - I'm sick and tired of dealing with downed drives.

Well, prior to today, I had not had the experience of restoring an Active Directory and an Exchange Server...so this was uncharted territory for me.  I had made a backup of my System State last night and the Exchange data, so I was all set there; it was just a matter of restoring it properly.

These are the steps that I underwent:

1. Put new drive in computer
2. Format/Partition it as NTFS
3. Installed the base OS (Windows Server 2003)
4. Configured the NIC and IP address
5. Installed IIS, DNS, and DHCP (though I did not configure them)
6. Rebooted into Directory Recovery mode
7. Restored my System State data, thereby bringing back the domain
8. Rebooted
9. Installed AntiVirus software
10. Installed Exchange 2003 and SP1
11. Restored the Exchange backup
12. Repaired the database (ESEUTIL /P ...)

It's all up and working now and I'm so excited.  What pleased me most was that from taking out the old drive and being completely back up and running it took less than 90 minutes actual time (a few hrs real time including dinner and other sundry items).  Now the whole domain is back and it feels good!