Verify Settings or a Recovery operation may fail at the "Get information about domain controller" or other steps (4235497)

When running a Verify Settings or Recovery operation in the Forest Recovery console, the operation may fail during the Get information about domain controller step with errors similar to the following:

"Cannot contact the DC. Make sure the DC is online and accessible and a firewall does not block connections to the DC.

OR

"An unknown error has occurred. Failed to connect to <dcname> timeout has expired"

WORKAROUD 1:

If you are not currently in a disaster recovery situation, upgrade to RMADFE 8.8 as this issue has been fixed in the latest release. In version, 8.8, RMADFE is no longer dependent on NTLM being responsive in order to perform a Domain/Forest recovery

WORKAROUND 2:

• If you are running Verify settings, select "skip and continue" until the operation completes
• Prior to attempting a Recovery operation, reboot the DCs into DSRM mode. If you encounter these errors after manually rebooting the DCs into DSRM mode, select "skip and continue" to bypass each error. You should not see any more errors once the "PREPARE FOR RESTORE FROM BACKUP" step begins

WORKAROUND 3:

If a Recovery operation is already running:

1. Stop the recovery console. You may have to use the Task Manager to kill the process
2. Manually reboot the DCs into DSRM mode
3. Start the FE console and start the Recovery operation again, from the beginning. Do not resume from the last known step

Please note: If you had selected "skip and continue" on each error during a recovery, and had not manually rebooted to DSRM mode prior to starting the recovery, your console may eventually hang at the “Detect current mode (DSRM or normal)” step.  Using the workarounds provided are safe as the steps where the errors occur do not make any changes to the DCs or Active Directory.