Server 2019 rename PDC

Question

Hello all - I made so many stupid moves in this one I don't know where to begin, but maybe one of you can help. The long story short is:

I joined a new DC (hostname DB65BFF3) to an existing domain

Promoted it to DC

Demoted the old DC (hostname ny-dc-01)

Renamed ny-dc-01 to be ny-dc-old

Renamed PDC to be ny-dc-01 so all existing shares and workstations would look to it without breaking connection

All the shares and DNS are working, but my AD is now down (for obvious reasons). Any commands I try now fail. DCDIAG shows the correct home server name, but still shows the old server name for default first site name. I cannot open AD User and Computers or any other AD application without it throwing errors that it cannot reach the domain.

I tried to rename the server back to the original name and that failed. I even tried a Hail Mary of renaming from the GUI which failed.

My obvious mistake was not having a BDC running during the rename process, but it's too late to fix that now.

Is there anything I can do? What about promoting the old server back to a DC and seeing I can join the domain? The metadata might still be there and it's still joined to the domain. Could that work?

Thank you kindly,

Tom

Answer 1

You're right, pretty screwed up. Might try manually creating DNS records for
NY-DC-01 = 192.168.1.5
DB65BFF3 = 192.168.1.5

then reboot

--please don't forget to upvote and Accept as answer if the reply is helpful--

Answer 2

Please run;

Dcdiag /v /c /d /e /s:%computername% >C:\dcdiag.log
repadmin /showrepl >C:\repl.txt
ipconfig /all > C:\dc1.txt
ipconfig /all > C:\dc2.txt
ipconfig /all > C:\problemworkstation.txt

then put unzipped text files up on OneDrive and share a link.