removing ghost NT and 2000 DCs

[Guest]

Currently, my company runs a mixed mode 2k domain and we are interested in
runnning a 2000/2003 domain. However, a previous network admin removed and
disposed of one NT DC and one 2K DC without any backup. Since they aren't
around, there is no way to run DC Promo and demote them. Can anyone tell me
how to remove these from active directory? Can I just delete them from AD or
is there a longer process?

 

[Mike Shepperd]

first you need to find out if the dead 2000 server hosted any FSMO roles:
"netdom query fsmo" at the command line should show you.

If the FSMO roles are all on existing servers, then you can run Metadata
Cleanup against the domain to remove any traces of the old DC's. I suspect
that you'll only have to clean out the 2k DC that is no longer there, but it
would be worth checking for the NT machine to make sure that it's all gone.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;216498

Make sure that there are no erroneous DNS entries for the dead machines.

That should clean up the errors you would see with AD Replication.