A few Qs, Please answer!?

Beany

Afternoon,

when upgrading 2008 to 2012, why do we have to run adprep and domainprep? In basic terms, what do these two do and what is their purpose?

I read somewhere that when upgrading to server 2012 both adrep and domainrep are not needed as server 2012 does this automatically, is this true?

Also, if i upgrade from a 2008 to server 2012, any files on the server 2008 hard drive will they still be present once 2012 has been installed?

thanks

Dracula28

Answer 1

Running Adprep.exe

Adprep.exe has parameters that perform a variety of operations that help prepare an existing Active Directory environment for a domain controller that runs a later version of Windows Server. Not all versions of Adprep.exe perform the same operations, but generally the different types of operations that Adprep.exe can perform include the following:

• Updating the Active Directory schema
• Updating security descriptors
• Modifying access control lists (ACLs) on Active Directory objects and on files in the SYSVOL shared folder
• Creating new objects, as needed
• Creating new containers, as needed

You can check which schema version you have by running the following command
dsquery * cn=schema,cn=configuration,dc=contoso,dc=com -scope base -attr objectVersion
Server2012s schema version is 56

Answer 2

Yes that is true. But you can update manually if you want to
Manual Schema Upgrade for Windows Server 2012 - TechNet Articles - United States (English) - TechNet Wiki

Answer 3

I have never performed such an in-place upgrade, so I do not know.