Dcpromo using an unattended answer file

Consider one customer I worked with in the past. The company had a number of sites, and not all of them had an IT staff on the premises. At one site, the only technical person they had was the receptionist. The company sent her through some training so she had some basic IT skills. Thus, the IT staff members at another site could talk her through anything they needed her to do on site. If the DC had a hardware failure that required a DC to be rebuilt, an IT person could either do a CD install or issue a server image using RIS or other third-party products. Typically, it isn't a good idea to image a DC because there are continual changes, and the image would be out of date pretty quickly. To get it promoted, they could use IFM and ship a DVD or tape with the restored system state of a DC in the domain, but then they'd have to talk the receptionist through the Dcpromo prompts and hope she didn't make any typos. Of course they would also have to trust her with a domain admin account.

A better option for Dcpromo would be to use the unattended answer file option. They could put the answer file on the DVD with the backup state and direct the receptionist to simply enter the following command from the command line or just make a simple .bat file and have her run that from the DVD.

C:> dcpromo /adv /answer:c:scripts\answerfile.txt

/

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answer option points to an answer file that would contain all the answers. In this case, the file is called "answerfile.txt" and is in the c:\scripts directory. Just provide the correct path in the command line, and it can exist in any directory of your choosing.

Example

Microsoft's Knowledge Base article 311078 is an excellent guide that contains samples for various answer files to promote the initial DC in a domain, a replica DC, and so on. The answer file shown here promotes a replica DC since IFM can only be used for replicas. Here is information about the various command lines so you know what is going on:

Steps: Important: Remove all comment lines (lines prefixed with a semicolon) before using this as an answer file.

[TABLE]

Note: Before running Dcpromo, you may want to rename the computer to a name reflective of a DC (i.e. Corp-DC2 rather than Corp-SRV1), depending on your naming convention. However, Windows 2003 permits renaming a DC without demoting it.

On the member server, execute the following command from a command prompt:

C:> Dcpromo /adv /answer:C:\dcpromo-unattend.txt

If successful, the computer will reboot automatically at the end of Dcpromo. You shouldn't have to enter any information manually or interact with any dialogs. If you are prompted for any information, it means information is missing from the answer file.

Edit the Dcpromo-unattend.txt file. Note that the password field has been erased to prevent the admin password from existing in a simple text file.

Note: Using the answer file option in the Dcpromo command line will prevent the new dialog that prompts you for the location of the system state restore files from appearing, just as the answer file will prevent any GUI dialog from appearing for any questions that are correctly defined in the answer file.

Debugging:

Clean up:
After the computer reboots, check to make sure Dcpromo was successful. From a command prompt, enter the command Net Share. You should then see Netlogon and Sysvol shares listed. If they don't show up, then the promotion wasn't successful, which would likely be due to failed replication. Also check the DNS settings.