A new client of mine lost the system disk on their Win Server 2003 last week. No backups. Install disks are lost. There is only 5 employees now, so having a server is overkill, and we are just going to go back to old-fashioned file-sharing. How do I break the client machines loose so they can be standalone again? I can not log into them with enough privs to make some of the changes I need to make to complete this cut-over. Thanks in advance! -Dave

Just go into system properties > computer name and join a workgroup instead. Should work if you know the admin username and password.

...Actualy, thats what I had planned on doing, and it worked on one client, but not the others. They had some of the client's security clamped so tight that I could not change the workgroup, and the clients will not let me log in with the admin account and password used on the server, because it can not verify the account info. I bet there is something stupid I'm missing here, I'm suffering from lack of sleep & desperation at this point! :-) Thanks, -Dave

Well things are going from bad to worse... I did finally learn the admin password for the clients, and I changed from using a domain to using a workgroup. Now the orginal account for each of these folks is gone, and we are just left with the Admin account in this new workgroup. Since the server/domain controller is toast, there seems to be no way of getting back the information stored in these people's profiles. Any ideas? -Dave

If you go to Documents and Settings you will see their former profiles in the form username.domainname create the new user and copy the contents of the username.domainname to their local profile. this assumes no folder redirection was enabled.

There are local users and domain users. If you have no domain server then you can't get the files back. You have to of course create local users on each machine. The cached credentials will soon stop working. If you can still access the server then you can get the files and move them to each of the users machines in the local user you created. It could be that they have access to the local machine as a local user but I'd think that rare. More likely they have been domain users with some local files. Playing to the angels Les Paul (1915-2009)

Did you happen to have offline files activated? In that case there should be a lot of data in the C:\Windows\CSC folder. The data is encrypted so you need CSCCMD 1.1 to extract it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/884739 It's a bit cryptic, that application, but read the info and you should be able to work it out.