I did a little clean up and demoted one of our DC's that also was running Exchange. Demotion went as planed but after the reboot it will not boot because it can't find the ntds.dit file. I rebooted it into recovery and sure enough the NTDS folder is gone. My AD is running just fine on our other servers but we are without exchange because it still thinks that its a DC and wont boot without the file. How to stop it from trying to be a DC? The server still shows that its a DC but will not let me remove it in safe mode/ recovery. Any ideas? Thanks

sounds like a repair install is in order. Imagine the power of knowing how to internet search http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Teachin...

did you uninstall exchange first? You can not demote a DC that is running exchange. You need to remove exchange before you can demote a dc

"did you uninstall exchange first? You can not demote a DC that is running exchange. You need to remove exchange before you can demote a dc" ahhhhhh nope. I totally forgot about that until you just posted it. I sure feel like a dumba$$ now. Well here is what I had to do to get everything back up for those who get into the same boat as me. Now this server was not the PDC or FSMO holder so I was ok with blowing away AD on it. You may not, so this might not be for you 1. Followed the "Unsupported" method here and big thanks to the auther Jorge: http://blogs.dirteam.com/blogs/jorg... 2. Deleted the server from the DC auth list on the running PDC server. Ran dcpromo again and joined it back to org domain. 3. At this point I notice my exchange services are FUBAR and will not start. bootup takes about 2 hour and still not exchange services. I booted into safe mode and disable all exchange services from auto starting just so I can boot into normal mode in a timely fashion. Disabling the services worked and boot only took a few min. 4. Booted into normal mode and double checked that all required exchange pre-req services are installed like IIS and DNS and that they are running. 5. Reinstalled exchange over the top of the old one. Don't worry, all your mailboxes and setting will remain. Be sure to follow the install process and run forest prep and domain prep just in case. 6. Download and install all updates and SP's. 7. I then rebooted and everything was back to the way it was 24 hour ago. Hope this helps someone out there.