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nigelbeatsonFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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clearing an obsolete 2003 server from our domain

We have network which currently has a windows 2008 standard server as our domain controller. We also have a new Windows 2012 standard server, running hyperv, which we have also installed active directory.

We would like to migrate the fsmo roles to the new server.

We firstly wanted to raise the functional level of the dc to 2012 standard, but find that we are advised that :-

 To update the domain functional level, the Active Directory Domain Controllers in the domain must be running the appropriate version of windows.

domain Name
domain.local

Current domain functional level
Windows Server 2003

The following Active Directory Domain Controllers are running earlier versions of windows:
domain Name      AD DC      Version of Windows
domain.local      server1.domain.local Windows Server 2003 5.2 (3790)


This windows 2003 standard server was on the far side of a wan, and is no longer in operation. ie it does notexist any more.

I dont know how this was removed, but I can confirm that it is still listed under "domain controllers" in our active directory.


What would be the best way of clearing this down, so that we can raise our functional level prior to moving the fsmo roles.

Any assistance would be very much appreciated.

Many thanks
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Dan Arseneau
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Metadata cleanup as mentioned by the experts above.  I would recommend that you first build a test environment and try it out there that is if you have any old version of Windows 2K3 Cd's lying around.  If it is your first time doing then you want to be really confident.  Below is a link to a very comprehensive video on youtube which discusses many things such as seizing FSMO roles, metadata cleanup and also removing AD from a recovered server.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzJTCYtp7XI
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sorry for the delay in responding, but I have only just got round to dealing with this matter.

I have just tried to delete the old 2003 dc server, and on selecting "This domain Controller is permenantly offline" tick box option and hitting delete, we get the following error :-

User generated image
Any suggestions on how we can resolve this?

Many thanks
Try running ADU&C from another DC or machine with the tools installed.  But I advise you to use Metadata Cleanup for this task.
many thanks to all.

The gui removal would not work, however, the command line metadata cleanup worked fine.