replacing existing DC Win 2000

[dante18]

I hope someone can help with this. I was wondering if I could replace an existing DC in a Win2000 domain? Is this possible without any adverse effects? I was thinking of building another member server and then running DCPromo on it, but I have been told although this would work I would lose all user accounts and AD information and would have to rebuild them by hand. does this sound plausible to anyone?

Thanks for the help,
Dante

 

[Magnus1]

I thought AD would replicate itself to all DC's on the network. Is this not true? If thats the case then you could simply just replicate all users and settings to the new DC and it should work. Am I wrong?

 

[ShackDaddy]

You would not lose your user accounts or AD information if you ran DCPROMO on a server that was already a member of the domain. What you need to make sure you do though, is once you have promoted the other server and you have two DC's, you need to migrate the FSMO roles (global catalog, etc) over to the new server, since typically exist on a single server in a domain. Once you've migrated those roles, you can run DCPROMO on the original DC and demote it to member server status. That's the basics of it. I've done it a few times and haven't run into any real issues.

ShackDaddy