We had a Disaster Recovery test recently. A Windows Server 2003 (Standard Edition; 32-bit) was restored from backup for the test. The IIS related services would not start and when we opened IIS Services Manager it prompted for a password but we could never successfully authenticate. We would get messages like "Access Denied - Server execution failed".
The server had been upgraded (an in-place upgrade) from Windows Server 2000 to Windows Server 2003. When doing a test recovery of the Server when it was Windows Server 2000 we would have IIS issues and had to perform steps like "msdtc -resetlog", "IISRESET", etc. to correct the issues but these steps did not work for Windows Server 2003.
I've never understood by restoring a server from backup would break IIS. Does anyone understand why IIS would break and how to either prevent or correct these issues?
Thanks