NT4.0 Migration to 2003 Small Business Server

[Frank Baisch]

I am about to perform a migration of a small network, less
than 20 users, currently on an NT network. After
reviewing the plan, I am a couple of questions.

First, can I demote my current NT PDC to a member server
without doing an install of NT. I have applications on
this server and we plan on using them from the NT Server
after the migration as a member server.

Second. When prepping the client PC's's for migrations,
it recommends you delete the printers and any shortcuts
referring to the NT server. Since I plan on using the NT
server for printing and some software applications, can I
leave the shortcuts to the server in place on the desktops
or should I delete them and recreate them after the
migration? Same question for the printers since I plan on
leaving them installed on the NT server.

Thank you in advance for any assistance you can offer.

Frank

 

[Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]]

Hi -

I am about to perform a migration of a small network, less
than 20 users, currently on an NT network. After
reviewing the plan, I am a couple of questions.

First, can I demote my current NT PDC to a member server
without doing an install of NT. I have applications on
this server and we plan on using them from the NT Server
after the migration as a member server.

No - there's no supported way to demote an NT4 DC to a member server - and I
wouldn't recommend using any of the third party/unsupported utilities for
this - you may end up with weird problems down the line that take longer to
fix than it would take to do this without migrating....
See this article:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...a0-ac03-43a6-a457-81e1695e5bb6&displaylang=en
for help migrating from an NT domain to SBS.

Second. When prepping the client PC's's for migrations,
it recommends you delete the printers and any shortcuts
referring to the NT server. Since I plan on using the NT
server for printing and some software applications, can I
leave the shortcuts to the server in place on the desktops
or should I delete them and recreate them after the
migration? Same question for the printers since I plan on
leaving them installed on the NT server.

If you're not changing anything on that server, and not creating a new
domain, you ought to be able to leave them alone - but I'm not sure as I've
never done an NT4-->SBS migration, so I'm not sure what you'll end up with.
I *think* that in SBS2003 you can have more than one DC, and hence could
keep your NT4 DC as a BDC and run in mixed mode - might be a good idea to
post this in one of the SBS groups for more help there.

Thank you in advance for any assistance you can offer.

Hope this helps somewhat.