Changing Domains...

[Jonathan Telep]

Hi, I hope someone can tell me that there is an easier
way to do this than what I've been doing. I set up AD a
couple of weeks ago on a Win2K server and joined all of
the workstations to it. It was working OK until I
realized that I named the domain the wrong thing and
managed to break the "dynamic updating" that AD does with
DNS servers. I don't mind having to set up another,
temporary AD server to "rename" the domain. My concern
is the arduous task of getting all of the workstations
into the new domain w/o breaking them again. It's been
my experience that the only way to have Win2K/XP
workstations switch domains is to:

1. Join the new domain.
2. Log in as the user in the new domain (thus creating
another profile on the local workstation).
3. Log out as that user and then as the local
administrator and copy the users old profile to the new
profile excluding the 'ntuser.dat', 'ntuser.dat.log'
and 'ntuser.ini' files.
4. Log back in as the "new" user in the new domain.

The problem is that:

A.) This is incredibly time consuming.
B.) Never works like it's supposed to and inevitabally,
breaks things that worked under the last profile.
C.) In the end the term "frustrated" would be an
understatement when it comes to the end-user.

Is there any other way to do this w/o breaking anything
and in a less time consuming manner that anyone else
knows about?

Anybody's help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jon

[Roger Abell]

You have pretty much summed it up.
Since it is not possible to rename a W2k domain
you must destroy the domain and built a new one.
If your users were to first start using a machine local
account, rather than a domain account, and use the
FASTwiz from the support tools to move their files
and some of their look-and-feel to the new machine
local account, then they can ride out the domain
change, since the machine local account is not at
all impacted by the domain disjoin/join. Of course
you then need to do this all over again to get them
back using domain accounts again. FASTwiz really
copies files, Outlook files, etc. but does not do much
for profile specific things. What you outlined for the
profile, excluding the ntuser stuff, is the common
wisdom, but use of FASTwiz afterward to handle
Outlook files, etc may ease some of the pain.

--
Roger Abell
Microsoft MVP (Windows Server System: Security)
MCSE (W2k3,W2k,Nt4) MCDBA
"Jonathan Telep" > wrote in message
...
> Hi, I hope someone can tell me that there is an easier
> way to do this than what I've been doing. I set up AD a
> couple of weeks ago on a Win2K server and joined all of
> the workstations to it. It was working OK until I
> realized that I named the domain the wrong thing and
> managed to break the "dynamic updating" that AD does with
> DNS servers. I don't mind having to set up another,
> temporary AD server to "rename" the domain. My concern
> is the arduous task of getting all of the workstations
> into the new domain w/o breaking them again. It's been
> my experience that the only way to have Win2K/XP
> workstations switch domains is to:
>
> 1. Join the new domain.
> 2. Log in as the user in the new domain (thus creating
> another profile on the local workstation).
> 3. Log out as that user and then as the local
> administrator and copy the users old profile to the new
> profile excluding the 'ntuser.dat', 'ntuser.dat.log'
> and 'ntuser.ini' files.
> 4. Log back in as the "new" user in the new domain.
>
> The problem is that:
>
> A.) This is incredibly time consuming.
> B.) Never works like it's supposed to and inevitabally,
> breaks things that worked under the last profile.
> C.) In the end the term "frustrated" would be an
> understatement when it comes to the end-user.
>
> Is there any other way to do this w/o breaking anything
> and in a less time consuming manner that anyone else
> knows about?
>
> Anybody's help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jon