Plan, test, do some more testing....

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

...but it still goes wrong!

Kicked off another network migration today. First step is to upgrade the Domain Controllers from Windows 2000 to Windows 2003 to support a new Exchange 2007 environment.

Anyways I run through the adprep as I have done 1000 times before but for some reason /domainprep fails as it can’t find the SYSVOL folder. The SYSVOL was in default location and had replicated to all of the other DCs so this error surprised me.

After a look through the log file I found a technote that explained that I had to create a reg key on the DC and add the path to SYSVOL. After this the /domainprep switch worked ok. Joy.

Moving on I decided to upgrade the backup DC at HQ first so I ran the in-place upgrade and the server rebooted as expected to complete the upgrade.

After it rebooted I was greeted with an error message saying that the C: drive was not accessible (arrrgh!) and then after that the upgrade continued anyway and then complained about not being able to read the disk. Yet more joy.

Rebooted the server and was greeted with a dual boot option to boot Windows 2000 or 2003. Chanced it and tried the Server 2003 upgrade which bombed out again as it could not read the CD, I tried another Server 2003 CD and surprise surprise no joy.

Rebooted again and selected Windows 2000 as the boot option just to get the server back online. The server blue screened. Joy.

Decided to try a repair install of Windows 2000 and it claimed an upgrade TO windows 2000 is already in progress and if I wanted to continue anyway. I continued as I was obviously not upgrading from Windows 2000 to Windows 2000, weird.

After a long wait the repair completed and the server came back up but had bumped the OS down to SP2 and IE5 so had to install SP4 and “upgrade” to IE6 which was nice.

Now back to where I had started I copied the Server 2003 media to the hard drive and ran the inplace upgrade with no problems whatsoever!

So there you go, you can plan, test and then do some more planning but no matter what you do something always goes wrong.

I can only blame myself though. I said to the customer “This shouldn’t take too long....” What was I thinking!?

 

The next DC Im upgrading has all the FSMO roles on it, think I`ll move them to another DC first!

 

Sounds like you were having fun with your DC upgrades mate. "This shouldn't take too long . . ." classic ha ha I don't think there's a worse way to tempt fate in all of the IT world ha ha