dcpromo

Not to sound insulting, but check your physical connections. Ping the DC from the mbrsvr. Check to see if you can access each computer's shares from the other. If you can't, try deleting the mbrsvr account in AD and recreate it.

Ping the Domain Controller via its DNS name, not IP. DCPromo uses DNS, not the IP, to run. If you can't ping the Domain controller by dns name, then ping by IP to confirm that the two machines can actually see each other. Also, the new computer won't be a BDC, windows 2000 domain controllers all contain the directory structure, but some are operations masters (PDC emulator, Infrastructer, schema master...)

Anyway, if you can't ping by IP, check your TCP/IP configuration and make sure youhave specified your internal Active Directory integrated DNS server so that the member server can even see the DC DNS name, also check your subnet, and router specifications.

I'm willing to bet it's a DNS issue. I'm almost positive because I've run into this before.

Good luck.

Mike

It definately is as DNS issue.
First check that you have setup DNS correctly on the first domain controller.
Goto DNS under Administrator Tools/DNS.
In the tree click the server name, under that you have forward lookup zones (flz) and reverse lookup zones (rlz).
Under flz you should have your FQDN (ie company.co.uk or com) and under that you will have:
_msdcd
_sites
_tcp
_udp
If you don't have these then you can try and unistall dns and re-install it to get them but when I've done thatit never works and the only other way I've got round it is to start the server from scratch (a real pain) but someone might be able to tell you how to get round that without formatting.
If you do have these then DNS is setup ok. It uses ldap to add another domain controller into the active directory which is under _tcp (I think).
Right, if you have them then you have to creat a rlz, right mouse click rlz and add new zone, all you add here is the ip of your network (if you use 192.168.0.x then you enter 192.168.0).
With that done then on the server you are trying to add, you have to put ip address of DNS server on the ip protocol (ip properties and enter the ip address of the first server in the primary DNS).
With that done you should then be able to ping company.co.uk if you can then you will be able to add the second server into the active directory.
I know this is long winded but DNS is a major part of active directory and if it's not configured right or parts of it missing then there is no way to get another server into the active directory.

Hope you can follow it all and that it helps.

Well, I ran into this same problem at home this weekend. It turned out that it didn't like that domain name I was using. When asked for the domain to join I put in:

contoso.msft

This gave your same error. After many checks, I tried it without the ".msft" and it worked just fine. Soooo, try to add your server to the domain but don't use the FQDN.

I got help from Microsoft, the tech pointed out to me that I had multiple DNS Ip addresses on both servers. I had to remove all the DNS IP except the one on DC W2K server. Then I did the DCPROMO and successfully promoted an additional DC.

Thank you all the suggesstion and help.

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