Adding a Windows server 2003 R2 machine to a Windows server 2000 domain

Posted Sun, 08/19/2007 - 01:00 by Matt

Here's an interesting one. I recently had to upgrade a few Server 2000 machines to Server 2003 R2. We were also replacing the hard disks which made backup easy.

We hit a problem when trying to promote the Server 2003 R2 machine to become a domain controller. After running ADPREP from the Server 2003 disk (as recommended) the promotion still failed. Finally after further investigation it seems that you need to run ADPREP from disk 2 of the Server 2003 disk set, which contains a slightly newer version of ADPREP.