Trawling the Internet trying to find information on how to upgrade from Windows 2003 Server SP2 to R2 is a heavily time consuming task. There seems to be very little information and the information that is there is not as straightforward as it should be.
My scenario is that I have a number of Windows 2003 Server machines, Some SP1, some SP2, some R2 and a mix of Standard and Enterprise. My plan would be to make them all R2 level so they are consistent. Should be easy? It is once you know how.
There are a whole load of caveats but fundamentally you simply need disk 2 from a matching R2 release and install that over Windows 2003 SP2. But now the caveats, these can pretty much be found on the Microsoft Support Site here.
They key information is "The product keys that are used during installation are unique for each channel and cannot be interchanged with another channel. For example, you cannot use a volume license product key with media from the OEM channel."
Remember, before you upgrade the domain controller you need to run the adprep /forestprep command from the R2 disk 2 (under the \CMPNENTS\RD\ADPREP folder).
Obtaining the disk 2 of R2 is made a lot easier if you are a member of Microsoft Technet as you can simply download the .ISO image.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Lukas Beeler // Oct 8, 2007 at 6:59 pm
You know, there is no need to upgrade the machines to R2 unless you need one of the special features.
2 jasonslater // Oct 9, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Good point Lukas, that’s very true. The one thing I have been keen to get hold of is the new printer configuration facilities in R2 for the print server. Thought, this can be integrated via GPO, it also requires a schema update (to v31) on the AD machines.
Jas.
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