Ok, I've got an unusual active directory problem, that at 5AM is still keeping me up thinking about options.
Have a machine that is dying, running Windows 2000 Server. It's a stand alone PDC. But this machine also has a specific piece of software that may never be replicated and so we have to preserve it. The hardware just won't stand for that, though. So, we virtualized the drives, etc. and all is good. Boots up fine in HyperV server, software starts, etc. Issue: it took about a week and a half to get this all back on track with the help of some vendors on some specific pieces of hardware. In the meantime, we left the dying box run, thinking we'd do this as a test to then merge over just the changed data as we finished. Except they've added a few new users and PCs, which I didn't count on happening :( So, I can't run a "System State" restore in Win2k, because it will bomb (registry is changed since this has been repair installed to make work on a VM) tried that with a copy of a VHD. The machine name it has (SERVER1) is the same as the physical machine name, etc.. in all purposes it's a clone. Has anyone tried to just manually copy only the NTDS folder from one to another assuming machine names and IDs are the same? This technically should work in this goofy circumstance in win2k, but I can't find anyone who has tried such a feat..
