Windows 2000 Server Replication Problem

[Arsyn]

I'm trying to avoid doing a demotion and promotion.

Backstory:

My company has a WAN consisting of six sites each with a domain controller. We are thinking about acquiring another smaller company with three sites with a WAN of their own. My boss wanted one domain and he wanted all the sites connected to one another. However, since our sites were using old firewalls with some incompatible tunneling protocol the two companies cannot be tied together in a full mesh.

I managed to connect all three sites of the other company to our main office's firewall. I then demoted all of the other company's domain controllers and added them to our domain, so now we have a total of nine domain controllers. But that created a replication issue. The three new DC's can only communicate with one of the original DC's due to the incomplete WAN links. Everything worked fine because our main office acted like a "bridge" to the rest of the domain. So while the communication between the DCs weren't complete, the AD database was always up-to-date due to the "bridge" DC.

Problem:

Recently that "bridge" DC failed. I'm talking complete hardware failure. We could not bring it back to life so now we have a situation where five servers from my company cannot replicate to the other three servers. I tried to remedy this by installing Windows 2000 server on a temporary DC. The problem I have now is that the new DC can see all 8 other DC's, but the three DCs from the other site can't see the new DC. I now have a situation where replication only happens one way on the "bridge". I can get changes from the other three DCs which replicate fine amongst each other but the changes from my company don't show up on their end since there's no inbound replication on the other three serves due to the fact that they don't know the new server exists.

Question:

How can I manually FORCE the three DCs to recognize the new "bridge" domain controller. I've tried everything. I'm trying to avoid doing a DCpromo and redoing the domain controllers. Is there a way I can get the other company's DCS to see the new one so that I can manually create an inbound replication link?

 

[Arsyn]

Okay, I established communication between sites, but the WAN link has been down so long that the DC can't recognize the other DC objects. How do I fix outdated replication links without running a DCpromo.

 

[Arsyn]

I ran replmon.exe and ran a search for replication errors and here's what I got:

ctive Directory Replication Domain Controller Replication Failure Output
Printed at    2/28/2007 8:20:58 AM

Below are the replication failures detected on Domain Controllers for this domain:

Domain Controller Name:                   [SERVER_NAME]
              Directory Partition:        ERROR reading partition: CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=[myDomain],DC=local
              Replication Partner:        
              Failure Code:               
              Failure Reason:             

Domain Controller Name:                   [SERVER_NAME]
              Directory Partition:        ERROR reading partition: CN=Configuration,DC=[MyDomain],DC=local
              Replication Partner:        
              Failure Code:               
              Failure Reason:             

Domain Controller Name:                   [SERVER_NAME]
              Directory Partition:        ERROR reading partition: DC=[MyDomain],DC=local
              Replication Partner:        
              Failure Code:               
              Failure Reason:

I think this happened because the communications links between the servers have been down for months. How do I clear out the old information and reestablish a new connection without running DCpromo. I'm trying to find an easy way first before I erase everything and start over.

 

[unclerico]

how is your DNS configuration? Is everything else on the network functioning correctly besides replication?