Demote Win2000 Exchange runing as second DC

[gaigan]

I have searched the site (and many others) for answers to a problem we are having. In order to allow for Disaster Recovery of an EX server MS do not recommend having it as a DC.

We wish to demote our win2000 Exchange(2000) server which is currently running as a DC(second). I have read articals on making sure it is not the Global Catalog etc but have not found a definitive step by step guide which gives you a hope in hell of being left with a stable Active Directory after the demotion.(having tried some of them out in a test enviroment!)

Can anyone offer any guidance.

 

[fr33l3r]

Completely remove one is hard to accomplish. There will allways be rubbisch from an DC in the domain.

There are 5 master roles that has to be transfered to another DC if one or more are running on your mailserver.

1. Active Directory Schema
2. DNS Master
3. RID
4. PDC emulator
5. Infrastructure

After this there is the Global catalog that must be transfered.

Now you can try to demote your DC by DCPROMO at the prompt.

However i have run an exchange server for 5 years now on a DC and i have never had any problems with an disaster recovery cause i never needed one.

To make your information Store save just make good backups of it! If you have a crash you build up a new DC and restore your backups. You can remove the bad DC entries later. Just make sure you have no roles pointed to the mail DC. The only role needed is the Global catalog.

I have removed several DC's because of crashes and i never had really big problems doing it. But thats my opinion.

I would rather use mirroring on the mailserver so HDD failures are a minimum risk.