Nt to 2000 Jump

[drewmaztech]

We're going to be upgrading our servers. Presently we have 1 PDC and several BDC's.

I know to upgrade the PDC first. Although we'd love to be able to load a 2000 DC from scratch, it's just not possible. "Upgrading" is the route we're going.

Has anyone actually gone through the process of upgrading an NT PDC to 2000 server? What bumps in the road did you encounter? I'm fishing for tips to make this as smooth as possible so I don't have to be here until 4am.

I need to do this overnight on the PDC and still have the BDC's communicate with the new 2000 server.
Once that's done, it's on to the BDC's.

[techleet]

As far as my upgrade experience goes, it was smooth as silk
I never actually waited around long enough to see if NT4 bdcs could communicate with a Win2k dc, because I upgraded all at once, but as far as I know it should work just fine. The downside is you'd be in mixed mode.

Good luck!

[edball]

I don't know about servers but I'm 0 for 3 on upgrades from NT to W2000. 3 for 3 from 98 to 2000. I had different problems on every machine but ended up starting from scratch on them all. Make sure you have a good back-up.

[Mike Turley]

The first thing you need is a good verified backup of the machine you are upgrading. Secondly you need to run winnt32 /checkupgradeonly from the Windows 2000 Server CD. This will look at any hardware, software and drivers on the machine and tell you if there are any known issues with them. If all looks OK you should be fine to go ahead. Make sure you have up-to-date SCSI controller drivers on a floppy in case you need them during the text mode setup.

Make sure you know how you are going to set up your DNS. You will need a domain name. I would recommend that you use .local rather than .com etc as your suffix so that you don't have problems accessing your ISP hosted web site.

Overall I've had few problems upgrading.

Good Luck,

Mike

[drewmaztech]

We have real-time mirroring servers and mirrored hard drives. I was planning on pulling one of the mirrored drives before the upgrade so we can go back quick if we need to.

Most of the problems we're encountering so far ( in doing the workstations ) are the weird-proprietary-written-before-1912 software.

[silencio]

Just in case you're running Compaq servers, check out the Primer Utility.

It's used to remove NT4/3.51 Compaq drivers and utilities that are unsupported on 2000 and would/could cause install problems on the path to 2000 migration. Great tool.. can save you some big headaches.

[supatech]

http://support.microsoft.com/default...;EN-US;q260871

[supatech]

http://support.microsoft.com/default...EN-US;Q298107&

upgrade info