Upgrade to windows 2003

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Tung Dang

Hi, we are currently running on windows NT 4.0 and we would like to migrate
it to use AD but not sure if we need to upgrade the NT box first or put in
the windows 2003 and do a DCPROMO first. How can we keep all the account
currently locate in the NT box? Thanks
 
You must upgrade the PDC of your existing domain first in order to get all
your user accounts into the new domain.

hth
DDS W 2k MVP MCSE
 
There are different ways when you want to plan to migrate to w2k3. You can
do a inplace upgarde of your PDC BDCs but the hardware might be old and is
not supported. Other way is to migrate to w2k3 i.e. a parallel migration in
which you create a fresh w2k3 forest with your planned out domain structure
and then you establish trust with you existing NT enterprise. Then you can
either use ADMT ver 2.0 or any third party tool i.e. netiq DMA to migrate
users from NT to w2k3 forest. A good thing about using Netiq dma is that you
have several options that can make migration smooth for ex: rollback
options, complex password migration, SID history migration, Security
descriptor migration etc. I am not sure if ADMT 2.0 has improved in much
greater sence then its predecessor. Once the migration of users is done,
users still can access the resources in both w2k3 and nt servers.
Once everything is migrated over you can collapse the NT enterprise and go
to native mode in w2k3

-Jim
 
Thank you very much

Jim Singh said:
There are different ways when you want to plan to migrate to w2k3. You can
do a inplace upgarde of your PDC BDCs but the hardware might be old and is
not supported. Other way is to migrate to w2k3 i.e. a parallel migration in
which you create a fresh w2k3 forest with your planned out domain structure
and then you establish trust with you existing NT enterprise. Then you can
either use ADMT ver 2.0 or any third party tool i.e. netiq DMA to migrate
users from NT to w2k3 forest. A good thing about using Netiq dma is that you
have several options that can make migration smooth for ex: rollback
options, complex password migration, SID history migration, Security
descriptor migration etc. I am not sure if ADMT 2.0 has improved in much
greater sence then its predecessor. Once the migration of users is done,
users still can access the resources in both w2k3 and nt servers.
Once everything is migrated over you can collapse the NT enterprise and go
to native mode in w2k3

-Jim
Click to expand...
 
What I did was take a spare machine, installed Windows NT on it, made it a
BDC and synchronized it with the PDC.

Then I took the PDC offline so I could put the old system back together in
case of error, and made the newly installed BDC a PDC.

Then I upgraded the test PDC I just made to Windows 2003. Make sure that
this machine looks to itself as the DNS server and forward all other DNS
requests to your ISP.

Doing it this way should provide you with a good way to go back to your old
system in case things don't go well and keeps your production PDC offline so
that it doesnt get messed up. It also autmatically brings in your existing
names, groups, passwords...etc.

Good luck...I spent many weekends getting mine right.
 
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