How to Promote Domain Controller to Primary - Guide Needed

[Jason S. Global Moderator]

Without getting into great detail, we had a catastrophic failure in our production environment last week. Our Primary and Secondary DCs were lost. Since last Friday we've been running our domain using a third DC that's located at our disaster recovery location (off site.)

 

to simplify:

 

Primary DC - DC01

Secondary DC - DC02

Third DC - DRDC01 (off site)

 

this works just fine right now; however, since the 1st two are now gone, the 3rd DC needs to be changed to the primary so that we can then recreate the two that were lost. This environment is completely Windows 2008 R2 based. from my understanding, we cant simply recreate DCs without first having an official primary DC. The off site one, DRDC01, is not primary in any capacity.

 

Can someone here guide me through this process?

[sc302 Veteran]

you need to seize fsmo roles.  pick a dc and perform the steps to seize.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/6736.move-transfering-or-seizing-fsmo-roles-with-ad-powershell-command-to-another-domain-controller.aspx

 

[Jason S. Global Moderator]

The terms 'seize' and 'transfer' used by the article are confusing. Those words would assume that the primary DC is already up, right? in this case, i believe the use of the "-force" switch causes the remaining DC to create those roles automatically. is that correct?

 

fwiw, my coworker did this work last night. our 3rd DRDC is now the primary. i'm just trying to learn and understand how to do it.

[sc302 Veteran]

transfer assumes that the dc is up

seize assumes that the dc is either in a irrecoverable state or has been blown off the face of the earth or god has decided to throw it into a black hole.

 

 

[Jason S. Global Moderator]

thanks for clarifying.

 

so this command, below, means that youre 'seizing' the roles, all of them, numbered 0-4?

 

Move-ADDirectoryServerOperationMasterRole -Identity "Target-DC" -OperationMasterRole SchemaMaster,RIDMaster,InfrastructureMaster,DomainNamingMaster,PDCEmulator -Force

[sc302 Veteran]

Yes, all 5.