Need to break off 2 DC's into its own forest - HELP!

[RomualPiecyk]

I have a Active Directory forest with one tree, and a single domain.

I have a remote office with two domain controllers for this domain.

This remote office is breaking away from my organization into its own company, and I need to figure out how to break them away.

My guess is that I will need to create a separate forest for these two domain controllers, and a new domain within that forest. Is that correct? If so, how do I go about doing this? Do I run dcpromo on one of the domain controllers in the remote office to create the new forest?

Any thoughts that anyone has will be highly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Jpoandl]

One method would be to create a brand new Forest/domain for the new company. Then migrate the user accounts and data.

I can not think of an easy way to break them off. The problem is that you are one big domain right now.



Joseph L. Poandl
MCSE 2003

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[jtb]

you can do this with 2003... but there is no easy way without 3rd party tools in 2000...

(I don't know how, just saw it done last month)

JTB
Have Certs, Will Travel
"A knight without armour in a [cyber] land."

 

[wallst32]

jtb is correct; you can do this with Windows 2003 using the rendom utility, but not in W2K.

For Windows 2000, you can create the new forest by installing a new server, then establish a trust between the two domains, and use the ADMT tool to migrate user and computer accounts over to the new domain.

There's a good amount of documentation on ADMT on MSFT's site.

Since the remote site has 2 DCs, you could probably demote one and then use it to create a new domain, but make sure the other has all the FMSOs first. Come to think of it, you should probably break connectivity between the two locations, then make a DC on each side seize all the FMSOs.