Friday, June 23, 2006

Making a Windows 2003 R2 server a DC

This is going to start being an issue when upgrading new servers to domain controllers. If you have Windows 2003 R2 installed on a machine and you try to run DCPROMO, you will get an error message saying that the schemas do not match. HUH?
So it says to run ADPREP with the \forestprep switch…no problem. But when you run it from the R2 CD it says that it has already been run. Now what?
Some history…at this point your Active Directory should be a version 30…and you need version 31 of the schema to upgrade a R2 server to a DC. So this is what you need to do.

Pull out the Windows 2003 R2 CD2 and drill down to \CMPNENTS\R2\ADPREP\adprep.exe with the \forestprep.

This will bring your AD up to version 31 and you can now DCPROMO the R2 server.
Side note…who knew you actually needed the second CD for anything.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=917385

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