Where's a guide to Remove Win2k PDC, replace with Win2k BDC?

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ZeroX

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I can't seem to find a good guide anywhere, but I can't think of a better set of terms to plug into google. Any help is much appreciated.
 
The guides at Microsoft TechNet are good.
But, Windows 2000 does not function as a PDC or BDC. Any domain controller functions on that OS require Active Directory. If you upgraded your in place NT 4 PDC domain controller to Windows 2000 it installed active directory. The only way to go back is to have an offline NT4 BDC available and do a PDC promotion; with the upgraded NT4 now 2K Active directory box offline...
 
The current PDC was an NT box that was upgraded to 2000 server long ago. The BDC is a from-the-start Windows 2000 server machine that has been doing essentially nothing on the network for a long time. We want to essentially push all of activedirectory to the NEW machine and then simply remove the old one.
 
I think I follow... you no longer have any NT4 domain controllers? With Windows 2000 & 2003 there are only domain controllers with active directory or member servers with no active directory now. You need active directory for users to logon to and such..

here are the concepts or steps for the "BDC" machine:
1. install active directory if it is not already installed
2. let replication occur.. could be 30 minutes or days depending on your network etc.
3. Transfer all of your "FSMO" or operational master roles to the new server (very important).
3a. unplug the "PDC" machine for a day or so and resolve any problems
4. run dcpromo (down) on the "PDC" machine to remove it from active directory

5.. things can be more complex if you are running exhange or other services or applications that depend on Active Directory.. check out TechNet

these are the concepts or steps... I wouldn't proceed to any step without making sure the server is running great with no event errors and having read up on what exactly should happen... if you lose your domain it is a serious pain in the ass, and disastours for your company. I have been there. I am only offering an opinion, so please investigate further... dang I sound like a lawyer :eek:
 
One other thing to consider is to take one of your BDC's off the network before you make any changes. That way you have a backup to fall back on if something goes wrong.
 
It sounds like the newer server is just a member server. you need to promote it to a domain controller. After everything replicates they should be the same. If you wanna remove the old one you need to transfer the master roles or your going to have a lot of problems. there should be a guide on how to do this on microsoft website.
 
j4zzee said:
3. Transfer all of your "FSMO" or operational master roles to the new server (very important).
Click to expand...
This alone was a big, big help.

It took a little while for all of the replication to go through (I wish there was some kind of dialog or progress bar so you know when it's happening or when it's done) but we successfully demoted the old server to a member server and promoted the new server to a Global Catalog server and made it operations master for everything.

It was a little bit of work because we needed to rename the new server to have the name of the old server, so in order to make everything work we had to transfer roles back and forth and replicate several times, but in the end, it was seamless for the people coming into work in the morning.

Thanks!
 
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