Child domains and forests

[dandy34]

Time for a really dumb question but that's part of the job, right?
As stated on my last post, I have three domains. I started with seven when I walked onto this job and have been hacking them up ever since to try to get a better handle on the management of the network (We only need three domains) In my reading on trusts, both transitive and non-transitive, I find that I should have a "parent" domain and the others should be "child" domains. Now for the question, if I dcpromo a domain and make it a child, what are the chances of that domains GC getting lost or corrupted? My background is almost exclusively Novell and I've found this is the best place to come running when I get lost in Windows Server Land.
Thanks,

Sam

 

[kmkeshav]

You mentioned you have three domains. I assume you should either have a single forest structure with all the three domains placed inside that forest or you should have three different forests holding their respective domains.

A set of domains (with root/parent/child relationship) form a domain tree.

A set of domain trees form a forest.

When you create your first Windows domain for your organization, you will be creating a forest, a domain tree, and a root domain. This is default. Under the root domain, you will be creating sub domains which in turn become parent domains for the domains you create under them.

You can place CG on any domain controller and you can have more than one CG in a domain.

 

[dandy34]

Unfortunately I have three forests with one domain each and I want one forest with three domains. I understand the way to create the child domains,I need to know how difficult it's going to be to "fix" the problem and get my network back to where it should be.
The person before me thought that all you had to do was create a domain and let it be it's own GC and don't worry about communicating with the other domains, hence I had seven domains for 120 computers in one organization.
I'm trying to get us back under one forest so I can better organize trusts and make better use of the network.

 

[NickFerrar]

I'm not sure if there is anyway to easily merge one forest into another, I only looked at this sort of thing a year or two back and came to the conclusion I'd need to create a new child domain in the forest I want to keep and migrate the accounts out of the other forest into that. This might of changed though (or there may be 3rd party tools to do it).