We got one of our W2k servers joining the domain yesterday. After having spent the best part of 5 days trying to work out how to get a domain controller out of its broken active directory domain and joining the *real* AD domain we managed to do it – and without Microsoft’s £185 help (ok – we asked for help but it was our guy who found the solution but we are very grateful for your help MS!). It involved setting the HKLM/currentcontolset/control/productoptions/producttype regkey so that the server read ServerNT instead of LanmanNT. A reboot later and the server now thinks its just a domain controller. Then ADSIEdit was used to remove the server from Active Directory on the live sites, the server renamed into a different workgroup,rebooted, dcpromo’d as a DC as the first controller in a new domain/forest. Rebooted, dcpromo’d back as a standalone server, rebooted and then dcpromo’d back into the original domain. Hey presto – the server synched ok. For those of you more interested in this I will be writing up my experiences and posting them somewhere on this site so hopefully no-one else will have to go through the pain again! I now have to repeat the whole process on our email server and then I can install exchange in disaster recovery mode (a whole new ball game) and hopefully we’ll be back to email again soon. 5 days is *far* to long to do a restore and MS’s solution at the time was looking more and more like it was going to have to be a reinstall – not something I was looking forward to and makes you wonder why you backed up! Fortunately as you can see we seem to have made some more progress.
WinNT = workstation
ServerNT = Member server (will allow dc promo to promote)
LanmanNT = Domain controller (will allow dcpromo to demote)