dcpromo demotion hangs during demotion ... Out of ideas here.

[John French]

I have DC that was a temporary fix at a site. The original DC is back in
place and operational so I brought the temp DC back to out main site (moved
it in AD sites and services) and tried to run dcpromo to demote it. The
process hangs wheng it gets to the part about transfering FSMO roles to
other DCs (the temp had no FSMO roles anyway). dcpromo.log stops on the
line describing the role transfer. I let it sit there for about three
hours, shouldn't it be done by that point? When I restarted it, it came up,
repaired it's database and reenabled replication (replemon.exe shows good
contact).

1. What's the safest, most graceful way of getting this thing out of AD? I
will reformat it before reusing it.

2. What's the diff in removing it via ntdsutil metadata cleanup and simply
deleting it via adsiedit.msc?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Dave Shaw [MVP]]

Chances are the DC you are trying to demote can't find another DC to
replicate changes off of. Is this DC pointing to the DNS server hosting
accurate SRV records?

If getting that straight doesn't work and you have Service Pack 2 or higher
on Win2k, then try DCPROMO /forceremove. It will allow you to demote the
DC, but you will still need to do a metadata cleanup with NTDSUtil. If you
don't plan to keep the installation, just take it off the network adn format
it - then do your metadata cleanup.

-ds