At last, after a few hours of thumb twiddling I have my new backup DC up and running under Virtual Server. A few hours? That’s because whilst I was applying updates what was to be found? Windows Server Service Pack 2 that’s what. Approaching this with more than a little caution I applied it and downloaded it to our print server which I often use for testing odd applications (tut tut - I know!). It failed to install on the print server but seemed to go fine on the DC. However, when rebooting the DC I got a message ‘A driver failed to start’. Checking the Event Log revealed a number of sudden problems - to do with WMI, AD, and others. I guess that’s this morning tied up. I have to get to the bottom of these problems before I can uninstall AD from the old Windows 2000 DC.

I just noticed the new DC isn’t responding to the network. In addition, no NIC’s appear under networks. I’ve seen this once before to do with the IPSec Service and sure enough checking the vent loog - the first error I see is

“Event 4292: The IPSec service has entered block mode - to resolve disable IPSec and restart the server”

I am going to try that in the first instance - but according to Microsofts technote 912023

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912023

A corrupt local policy seems to be the problem and the fix is to edit the registry and delete the following subkey: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\IPSec\Policy\Local

Then rebuild a new local policy store by running

regsvr32 polstore.dll

This should be followed up by setting the IPSec service back to automatic.