Daily Cup of Tech

Imagine my surprise when I went to add my new Windows 2003 server to the domain as a domain controller only to be told that the version of Active Directory that I was running in the network was the wrong type and that Active Directory needed to be upgraded to support Windows 2003.

Now, those of you who are Active Directory savvy are probably thinking to yourself right about now, “I’ll bet he has a Windows 2000 version of the Active Directory running in his environment and he needs to run ADprep to get it upgraded.”

And you would be correct except for one thing. I added two Windows 2003 servers as domain controllers to the network a couple of years ago and I upgraded Active Directory at that time! There should be no need to upgrade Active Directory again!

And believe it or not, things started to get ever stranger after that!

I quickly came to the realization that the servers that I deployed a couple of years ago were Windows 2003 servers. The new servers that I have now are Windows 2003 R2 servers. Apparently, with the R2 versions, a new version of Active Directory is required.

So, we logically went to dig up the ADprep tool and run it against our Active Directory. The error message from DCPromo conveniently told us where to find the ADprep tool in the i386 directory of the Windows 2003 Server CD.  We went and ran APprep on the domain schema, starting with the /forestprep option.  ADprep then indicated that Active Directory was already upgraded and that we did not need to run ADprep.

So, we had a he said/she said scenario going on here where DCPromo said we needed to upgrade Active Directory while ADprep said that Active Directory was already upgraded and did not need to be run.  We definitely were scratching our heads and tearing our hair out with this one! (We even talked about having Rogain being covered under the companies medical plan!)

Here’e what we needed to do.  If you wish to add a Windows 2003 R2 server to a Windows 2000 Active Directory, you need to run the R2 version of the ADprep tool which is located on disc 2 (at least on my disks) at \CMPNENTS\R2\ADPREP\.  This version of ADprep will run on your network.

But, one other piece of weirdness also appeared for us.  If you have previously upgraded to a pre-Windows 2003 R2 version of Active Directory, you will not be required to run adprep /domainprep as this version does not make any changes to the domain schema.  You just need to run adprep /forestprep to upgrade the forest schema.

If you are looking for a good article for upgrading your Windows 2000 Active Directory to Windows 2003, check out What do I need to do to prepare my Windows 2000 forest for the installation of the first Windows Server 2003 DC?

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