Disaster recovery: Metadata cleanup
When you perform a complete domain or forest recovery, after you have restored the first DC system state, you have to cleanup metadata of the DCs on which you will reinstall AD using a DCPromo. For more information about disaster recovery plans I suggest you read this document.
On a Windows 2008 server when you delete the DC computer object, server object removal (cn=ServerName,cn=Servers,cn=SiteName, cn=Sites,cn=Configuration,dc=ForestRootDomain) and metadata cleanup are performed automatically. On a Windows 2003 server you need to use the ntdsutil command line tool and delete the server object manually. This post describes how to set up a semi automated process to perform these steps.