Hi. I am newly employed to manage an extremely small school network. I became an NT4 MCSE 10 years back, but most of my practical experience is in desktop. The network is very sick: there was a badly managed migration in the past from a Windows 2000 Server single DC to a new Windows 2003 PDC, and in the process the old 2000 Server was left serving the Group Policy redirected desktops for a bunch of users. Changes to the Group Policy settings on the PDC (Server 2003) to redirect those shares elsewhere are not honoured: on doing a result of Group Policy check, wildly different values appear, which seem to be cached somehow from the old configuration where the 2000 Server was the single DC, and I cannot trace where these old values are persisting. Using a DNS alias to redirect the shares hasn't worked either, so I cannot remove that old server from the network without breaking some user log-ins, despite all user profile references to the shares it provides being changed to point to copies elsewhere. An obviously related problem is that setting Group Policy on anything, like a desktop folder redirection or Internet proxy settings, is hit or miss, and most often doesn't work for all users, if any. To top it all, some staff have inexplicable login issues with their roaming profiles despite security settings on the relevant folders being fine. I have come to the conclusion that the only solution for the complete mess is to tear down the AD domain and reinstall everything properly from scratch. Fortunately the school is small enough that this won't be a major headache (only 40 user accounts or so in three organisational groups), and the rebuild process will also allow better reorganisation of file shares, or use of DFS instead, so the end result will be far better than a patch repair. Eventually I'd reintroduce a second rebuilt server to provide DFS and log-on redundancy. The issue here is lack of a spare server to do a parallel AD rebuild on while the network is in use, and a non-existent budget. What I'd like to do is upgrade the Server 2000 to Server 2003 and work on that, if I can extract it from the network without breaking too much, but I am unsure how I can go about doing such an upgrade. Can I use the 2003 Server media (which we have for the new server) to perform the upgrade once 2000 is reinstalled with sufficient Service Packs? Will I need a new Server 2003 license, or does the Server 2000 license key persist through the upgrade? If not, are there any retail upgrade paths for Server 2000 still available anywhere that don't involve a full-price license for Server 2003? Do I have any other obvious (low-cost) options where I can re-use the existing licenses? I'm sorry if these seem like noob questions to experienced IT admins. :S

Hello,If I understand correctly, you currently have 2 domain controllers. A windows 2000 and a windows 2003 and you think the W2K3 is not functioning properly? May be before you do a complete reinstall as you proposed we can help. Please post a completeDCdiag /v and ipconfig /all from both servers. You need to runt he commands from the comand prompt on the Domain controllers.On your license question, Yes you will need a separeate license if you do an inplace upgrade from W2K to W2K3. you cna check the original purchase order for your w2k3 and see what kind of license was bought.Isaac Oben MCITP:EA, MCSE