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JamesonJendreas

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Remove 2008 DC - Cannot Find Other DC's in Domain

OK, I completely screwed the pooch here, and I'm looking for some ideas.  So here's a little back story - I'm currently in the process of upgrading (well, replacing) my 2003 DC's with 2008.  I have two sites, my main HQ with 2 DC's and a remote office with 1.  I've installed 2 new 2008 DC's in my HQ, the two 2003s are still up for the time being (they'll be demoted in the near future).

Anyway, so I setup my 3rd DC, to be sent to my remote office.  I promoted the server, and placed it in the remote offices site and shut it down.  Now, we've got a problem with a much more important server, and we've decided that new DC for my remote site can wait a few weeks until we can get another approved and purchased.  

So, I booted the the server, and went through DCpromo to remove.  When I do this, I got that the domain controller could not be contacted (and it was reaching out to the DC in my remote location).  I thought (and this could be a poor choice) "I'll just go into sites and services and move this DC over to my main location and then remove the AD".  I did this no problem.  I rebooted the server.

Now when I run DCpromo to remove AD, I get the "You chose this is not the last DC in your domain, but the server could not contact any other domain controllers yadda yadda yadda do you wish to continue".  I've noticed in AD the server no longer has any replication partners.  

In the past I've had this issue when removing a DC fro ma remote location (this was a 2003 domain) where then I had to go back and delete the DC's from the AD manually, and I swear this never works as well as when dcpromo removed AD and the DC from the domain.  I can do it manually, but if anyone has  any suggestions on how to get the DC talking again, so that I can remove it, it would be appreciated.

Cheers
JJ



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Mike Kline
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JamesonJendreas

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Thanks,
That's what I was attempting to get around doing - I've done this in the past and would have a few random issues resulting from computers trying to contact it (and I cleared the metadata).  granted this was a totally different situation, different organization, the DC had been active for months and I was in the remote location.  I guess it sounds like a force removal is the only real solution.
You could look at logs and dcdiag and get it back online but the force/cleanup is fairly painless.