From: John Beckett 

Geo's advice is good (although I thought that the deadline for NT4 's
security patches had been moved forward again).

Actually doing what you want could be easy or very difficult, depending on
just what you have on the old machine, and how you have users organised.

The quick answer is that you do a new install of NT4 Server on the new
machine. During the install, you say you want it to be a BDC to your
existing domain.

You manually move all shares from the old DC to the new DC. This can be
automated, but not easily. Assuming small, you can just manually note what
folders and share (and their separate permissions) you have on the old
machine, and manually set them up the same way on the new.

You then promote the BDC to PDC (Server Manager on the new machine). I
think you also use Server Manager to delete the old machine (which will now
be a BDC).

After each step, you wait a while and test. You also check the logs in
Event Viewer on the PDC and BDC. Before deleting the old machine, you shut
it down for a few days and see if there are any problems.

Your biggest challenge may be installing NT4 if you put it on a big disk.
If the system and boot partitions are on a disk smaller than 8G you
probably will be ok.

John


Thees Peereboom  wrote in message
news::
> All,
>
> I will be buying myself a new workstation. The current one, a Dell
> Precision 220 2 x P3 833 mHz will replace my current NT4 server, which is
> a 6 years old P133 that is starting to make suspicious sounds.
>
> The current NT4 server is the PDC, all other machines are either Linux
> (1), FreeBSD (3), W2K (2) or XP (2) machines. Oh yes, and a couple of ME
> machines.
>
> So I need to install NT4 on the new server (my current workstation, which
> is one of the W2K machines). The problem is, of course, that I don't want
> to lose all my current configurations, userprofiles, etc.
>
> So what would be the safest route to change the NT4 PDC? I have no
> intention of upgrading it to W2K server or W2003 server.
>
> TIA,
>
> - Thees Peereboom

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