Demote A DC And Join A New Domain

[InTheWayBoy]

Okay, long story short we consolodated several domains into one with a recent merger. For the most part we just dumped everything and reloaded the new domain from the ground up. However, there is this one server from a previous domain that is not a member of this new domain. It used to be the DC for a small company, and also was setup to run two EMR applications on it. When we did the merge we just left it on it's own, but disabled all the unnecessary services (DHCP, WINS, etc). Luckily both of the EMR applications are fairly web-based, but we are running into file permission issues now since the server is part of a different domain than the clients.

Now the problem is both of these EMR's charge out the a** for support, and something like reloading them onto a fresh server is going to cost about $2000! So I'm starting to think about how I can fix this without having to reload. My thought is to demote it from being a DC, then join it to the new domain as a regular member server. Only problem is I'm really concerned about how reliable it will be going through a demotion and joining a new domain. I can handle all the simple things, reconfiguring the shares and network info and blah blah blah, but it's the deeper stuff I'm worried about. For instance, what will happen to the registry after a demotion and joining a new domain? Will it create new HLKM and HKCU trees, will permissions be carried over or reset, things like that.

Just a quick thought, would setting up trusts between the domain be easy? I really don't want to have to configure the new domain to know anything about the old one, but can't I do like a one-way trust so that the server in question allows users from the new

So mostly I'm just looking for any comments and I would love to hear some suggestions. But please, no reloading comments...I know that's the best way to go but I'm trying to avoid shelling out all that money for such a simple task. Of course if these EMR's would actually provide documentation and installation sources then I could do it all, but that's a different gripe. Thanx in advance!

[cluberti]

Setting up trusts is not hard, but you have to make sure you do it right. It's probably your safest bet:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechn...t1/adogd05.mspx

[Arsynic]

Demote the EMR DC and join it as a regular server to the domain. It doesn't have to be a member DC, just a regular server on the network. However, if you want to make it a DC, that should work as well.

[InTheWayBoy]

Ehh, ended up going with the trusts...setup a one-way trust from the EMR DC to the correct domain. I cleaned out the EMR's AD, removed all the users and such since that is all handled by the correct domain's DC. So far so good, much easier than I was expecting.