I posted previously about the commands necessary to do the forest and domain preparation prior to an upgrade of Windows 2003 Server to 2008. After several failed attempts, I have finally been able to complete the operating system upgrade successfully.

Be warned, If you have ISA 2004/ 2006 installed on the server and try to run the upgrade. It will begin the upgrade but fail after the second reboot with a CRITICAL_SERVICE_FAILED_TO_START error (0x0000005A).

Some quick notes from the upgrade:

• Enable a System Managed Page File (for upgrade)
• Remove any ISA server installs (as ISA 2006 does not work on Win 08)
• I recommend a minimum of 16GB free disk space
• Clean any unused objects (user accounts, computer accounts, Sites & services, etc.) from AD.
• Make sure DNS is all updated and correct, possibly give this a clean also.
• Run DCDiag and check for any AD errors.
• Make sure the Certificate Services is functioning correctly and all necessary certs are still valid.
• My upgrade required 3 reboots
• Takes approximately 2 hours (on a slow VM environment)
• Adds an additional 9GB to the hard drive.
• I applied all critical Windows update patches to the server prior to the upgrade
• All existing ‘Add/ Remove Programs’ shown (Including Win2003 SP2)

Back to playing with Server Core.

If you just happen to have an old VM running DC services for your house and it just happens to have ISA installed for testing but you happened to forget it was there. When upgrading the operating system to Windows Server 2008 it is going to fail with a CRITICAL_SERVICE_FAILED_TO_START error (0x0000005A) after the second reboot. Don’t panic, or trying to boot into safe mode to view the event log because that doesn’t work.

Simply restart and when presented an option for the version of windows to load, select the ‘Roll-back Windows Upgrade’ option. Un-install ISA from Windows 2003 and then attempt the upgrade again.

 I’m sure the upgrade how-to specified this as a step but it is much more fun learning by trial and error.

For future reference, the sites detailing how to run the domain and forest preparation tasks can be found here and here. The specific commands are:

• adprep /forestprep 
• adprep /rodcprep (For a forest with Read-Only DC’s)
• adprep /domainprep /gpprep

It is also important to note you must be running a 2003 Native domain.

Well money where my mouth is;

I have always been a big fan of Novel NetWare’s design. Run your server as nothing more than a device that serves clients, use a client device to administer the server. Reducing the load and preventing admins from doing nasty things to server Operating Systems.

With the RTM of Windows 2008 server last Tuesday (for us in Australia) I took it upon myself to download and start familiarising myself with the OS over the weekend. While it still looks and feels like windows, there are some big differences in the administration side of things. Particularly on the ‘Windows Server Core’ installation.

 Never before had I thought ‘I wonder how to change the screen resolution with a command prompt.’ Suffusive to say I will be doing a lot of research on command lines for server configurations.

For those that don’t know, NetSH will let you configure the IP address of the server and NetDom will join it to a domain.