I have a question for you, I think I know the answer but i want to make sure. I am going to demote one of our DC's to a member server then I am going to format and reinstall Server 2003, the server is not the last one in the domain. Here is my question, i am going to backup the system state so our DNS and other settings can be restored. Now here is my question, currently our server name is Exchange, but I plan on renaming it to Exchange1 or something like that. So when I do that, will all of our system state data not work becasue it was saved as Exchange and now is something else? What about our DHCP manual backup? Will that work as well or will we have to start off from scratch? Thanks

Hello, if you have another DC/DNS in the domain there is no need to use the system state backup after reinstallation, just let them replicate and you are done with AD and DNS(if AD integrated DNS zones are used). Just make sure the existing DCs are also DNS/GC and that all domain machines use them on the NIC. A DC with Exchange installed is NOT supported to be demoted FIRST Exchange MUST be moved to another server. DHCP backup can be done with netsh command line tool and you can also move it to another server.Best regards Meinolf Weber Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties or guarantees , and confers no rights.

The Exchange piece is what you have to be concerned with. I would recommend that you bring up a new Exchange server in that org, prior to retiring the existing server. That way, you can easily migrate the mailboxes, rather than having to restore data. As Meinolf recommended, DNS is not going to be a problem. It's the least of your worries. For more details about the Exchange tasks, you should post in the Exchange forum: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/exchangeserver Visit anITKB.com, an IT Knowledge Base.

Thanks for the replies, this server is not an Exchange server we wanted to use Exchange but we did not, so we would like to rename it, and plus we seem to be having some problems with this server (Windows keeps crashing) and the communcation beteen our main server and this one. We had a old domain that we added and then we tried to demote it and that did not work 100% so I figure if I demote, reformat, reinstall and reconfigure the system it should work bettter. Replication does sound like a wise idea, so what do you think?

If the demotion failed, you'll need to resort to a metadata cleanup. Here are the instructions for 2003: Metadata Cleanup for Active Directory 2000/2003 http://www.anitkb.com/2010/07/metadata-cleanup-for-active-directory_14.html Once you clean AD, then yes, wiping the server clean and starting from scratch is always a good recommendation. I am not a fan of OS repairs, upgrades, etc... Visit anITKB.com, an IT Knowledge Base.