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Sue TaylorFlag for United States of America

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How to migrate roles (FSMO still?) from one Server 2012 Essentials to another?

Hi everyone,

I need kind of a "walkthrough" on migrating from one server to another. It's a long story as to why but I've narrowed my troubleshooting down to: I need to migrate all data, printers, and "FSMO roles" from one Server 2012 Essentials server to another.

I'm building the new server as a VM right now. The old server is a VM that is running on a single drive instead of RAID--the joys of cleaning up somebody else's mess. I've tried moving the file from one drive to another manually, through the Hyper-V move tool, and have even tried using the P->V tool. It always fails because the old server is running on a single drive...that has bad blocks/sectors and is failing. Ugh...

Thankfully this is a small office of 13 computers, so there are only two printers for me to recreate. I know how to migrate data from one machine to another. How can I migrate domain ownership from one machine to another so that the computers don't have to get "re-joined" or anything?

Is there anything else I need to think about?
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Arjun Vyavahare
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go through below Youtube video in which step bye step FSMO Transfer is explained -

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=h0AOLeTM1AI

Regards,
Arjun
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For 2012 Essentials, the only way to do this is to create an answer file and use it to install Essentials in a "migration mode" during initial install. You cannot trigger or do this if the OS has already been installed. You'll have to re-install the OS in migration mode. Head to Technet and look at the 2012 essentials migration documentation to see how to create and use an answer file. It is actually pretty simple, but the documentation is a worthy read for a project like this.
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Cliff - What if I migrated FSMO from Essentials to Standard?
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Cliff Galiher
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I've run into a snag. 4 of the 5 roles are transferred. Schema is the only one left. Change is grayed out. :(

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That most often occurs when you are connected to a DC that isn't the current schema master. Transferring the schema master can only be done from the schema master itself.
Cliff was incredibly helpful!