NT to AD Migration Help Please!

[John]

Please Help! I am going to explain the situation. We have a NT Domain in
place that is running great. However, being one of the Administrators I am
in fear that NT is no longer supported and these are old Servers. A company
wants to come in and charge us $$$$$$ to upgrade for us. So my company is
hesitant on moving forward. I believe I might be able to go from Win NT
Domain to Win 2K AD Domain on my own with some help.

What do I need to do? I would like to keep the NT Domain running, until I am
sure the AD Side is up and going ok. Don't really want to touch any of the
Servers in place now. So I guess what I am asking is, can I setup a brand
new Dell Server with Win2K on it with Active Directory installed, join it to
the NT Domain? Then maybe throw in there a few test Users and see how it is
going? Then once I am confident that the Ad is working and running move to
the AD. I am fairly confident I can do it I just need some help!

[henkan...@gmail.com]

Do you have a complicated NT domain topology with multiple account and
resource domains?

If not, an alternative might be upgrading the NT4 PDC to W2k(3) and
perform a "Inplace upgrade" of the domain.

This ofcourse depends on how complicated your network design is and how
many users/workstations is affected etc. but it might be a upgrade path
worth investigating.

rgds
Henrik

[Enkidu]

It doesn't work that way. You cannot join a DC running AD to a Windows
NT Domain.

Your options are:

1) Upgrade your NT4 Domain. You could do this by installing a new
machine and putting NT4 on it and make it a BDC in the NT4 Domain. Then
promote it to PDC in the NT4 Domain. Install Win2k or Win2k3 on the new
NT4 PDC and promote it to DC (you can do it in one step) and you have an
AD Domain. Then progressively upgrade the old NT4 servers. When you have
none left, switch to native mode.

2) Build a new AD Domain (one DC to start with) and use ADMT and other
tools to migrate the users etc over to the new Domain. When you have no
users or resources on the old Domain shut it down (or do it
progressively as you go).

Either way you need to do a LOT of research and learning. Look around
for books and courses and search the Web, particularly the Microsoft
site. Plan it out and TAKE BACKUPS!!!

Cheers,

Cliff

[Ken Aldrich]

Hello,

Try these helpful links.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;325379
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;%5bLN%5d;555040

--
Ken Aldrich
DSRAZOR for Windows
Visual Click Software, Inc.
www.visualclick.com

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