After finishing the migration of a client to their new cloud-based Line of Business SaaS application, it was time to finally get rid of the last Windows 2003 Small Business Server that we manage. The client had a Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard server that used to be the database server for the on-premise application which was being re-purposed as the new Primary Domain Controller (PDC) for the domain. After installing the Active Directory Domain Services (ADDS) role on the new server, I went to run DCPROMO on the new server and found that it asked me to run ADPREP /FORESTPREP on the domain. Took me a little bit of searching to find the Windows 2003 Server media and ran the command successfully, but this did not do the trick – turns out I needed the Windows 2008 R2 Server media and run the ADPREP32 command several times to complete the domain preparation for the new server to be DCPROMO successfully. Extracted the support directory from the media ISO to a folder on the root of the old Windows 2003 Small Business Server and then ran the following commands in order:

ADPREP32 /FORESTPREP

This one took a long time as the server was going from Schema 31 to Schema 47.

ADPREP32 /DOMAINPREP

This one stated that I needed to run the next command, so I did.

ADPREP32 /DOMAINPREP /GPPREP

The command actually stated that the update was already applied. So went back to the Windows 2008 R2 Standard server and ran DCPROMO again which told me that I needed to run one more command.

ADPREP32 /RODCPREP

Ran this one even though I had no plans of having a Read-Only Domain Controller (RODC) in the domain. After all these commands the new server was able to be DCPROMO into the domain controller role. Now all that is left is FSMO roles, DNS, DHCP, printers and file shares.

If your company is going to use full disk encryption or has compliance requirements that you need consulting for, then contact us for assistance.