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How to Break a Forest

By valmirgp ·
I?ve got a branch office where the W2K domain controler is linked in a Forest such that it has a FQDN as sub.mydomain.com. In My headquarters, the FQDN is mydomain.com and the sites are linked trought a fiber link. Now the company wishes to release this link and here begins the problem.

Is there a way to take sub.mydomain.com from this forest and yet retain it as a Domain Controler so that we don't have to re-create the domain with all of it?s settings as a standalone domain?

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by Joseph Moore In reply to How to Break a Forest

Once you have a child domain set up, you are stuck with it.
But all hope is not lost. There might be a way to change things.

What you can try to do is transfer your user accounts, group accounts, machine accounts to ANOTHER domain. Here is what I am thinking.

Set up a new Win2K Server as a Domain Controller in whatever domain you want to belong to (the root of your own Tree and Forest, NEWDOMAIN.COM for example). This Win2KServer will only be used temporarily.
You could then run ADMT, the Active Directory Migration Tool to migrate your users/machines/groups from sub.mydomain.com to NEWDOMAIN.COM

After that, run DCPROMO on your sub.mydomain.com machine to remove it as a domain controller, and removing the entire sub.mydomain.com domain.
Then run DCPROMO again, and add this server to the NEWDOMAIN.COM domain, making it a 2nd domain controller.

Then transfer all FSMO roles from the first NEWDOMAIN.COM domain controller to this server that you want as your domain controller.

You could then lastly run DCPROMO on the machine that now no longer has any FSMO roles, changing it back to no longer be a DC.

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by Joseph Moore In reply to

So, how does that sound? The goal is to preserve user accounts, machine accounts, group accounts, because they are all a pain to make over again.
Here is a TEchnet article on ADMT, just what it is and what it does:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/howitworks/activedirectory/admt.asp
(please remove any spaces)

Link also at:
http://tinyurl.com/7pl5


hope this helps

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by valmirgp In reply to

Well, It would be a lot easier to be able to just let the twig be transplanted outside to grow alone, but the workaround seems reasonable.

Thank you bigtime.

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by CG IT In reply to How to Break a Forest

God has spoken [Joseph]. I wonder how come Microsoft hasn't offered him gobs of $$ to work for them???? [not joking or kidding at all].

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by valmirgp In reply to How to Break a Forest

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