Dcpromo Does Not Work If Administrator Account Is Deleted or the Domain Guests Account Is Manually Created (260941)

SYMPTOMS

If NetWare Directory Services (NDS) for Windows NT is installed and the Administrator account is deleted before you upgrade to Windows 2000 Server, the dcpromo portion of the upgrade of the PDC will fail with this error message:

The operation failed because: The Directory Service (DS) is missing critical information after installation and cannot proceed. If this is a replica, please rejoin the machine to the domain.

Directory object not found.

You may also experience related upgrade problems from Windows NT 3.51 if you create a Domain Guests account manually before the upgrade. Note that Windows NT 4.0 guards against the deletion of these accounts.

CAUSE

This behavior occurs if Windows 2000 Setup does not delete and re-create the Domain Guests account and re-create the Administrator account during the upgrade process.

RESOLUTION

To resolve this problem, obtain the latest service pack for Windows 2000. For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

260910 How to Obtain the Latest Windows 2000 Service Pack

The fix for this issue re-creates all the important accounts before the upgrade occurs.

NOTE: Another solution is to use a version of Windows 2000 that has SP1 slipstreamed into it to upgrade the PDC (Primary Domain Controller).

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

This problem was first corrected in Windows 2000 Service Pack 1.

MORE INFORMATION

For additional information about how to install Windows 2000 and Windows 2000 hotfixes at the same time, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

249149 Installing Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows 2000 Hotfixes