Adding a 2008R2 Child Domain to a 2003R2 forest

[Kaysel]

Hi, I’m running Windows 2003 R2 forest. Here in the root domain I have 2 root servers. Under this I also have two child domains, lets consider them as B and C. Apart from this I also need to add a 3rd child domain (D). This will contain two 2008R2 DCs which will not be DNS servers. Now what I was planning was to move all the DCs to 2008R2 for new few months but as I need to add another child domain and I think this is the good time to start moving to 2008R2 for the DCs.

Now according to this I have few questions which need to be cleared before I move ahead, which are as follows:

First, I would like to know what is I add a 2008R2 child domain, will I need to run adprep /forestprep and adprep /domainprep against my current DCs in the forest root? Is the purpose of these to bring 2003R2 Schema up to the same level as 2008R2?. Second, after the upgrade will I be able to add servers, run dcpromo and create the new domain as a child of A?

Please provide your suggestions. Many thanks.

[Stel]

Yes, you will need to upgrade ith adprep /forestprep once the root domain is upgraded. You will also need to run adprep /domainprep in each domain that should have Windows server 2008 R2 DCs. As per your second question, yes it will work after preparing the root domain.

Apart from this, as a suggestion I would like to tell just make sure you have a tested backup of the root domain and each child domain DCs before you start the process. This is to make sure that in case something goes wrong(worst case scenario) you
can do a forest recovery . In case you required the recovery, just check out the following article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...ry(WS.10).aspx

[Kaysel]

Thank you. I'll read these links and lay out my game plan.