Windows Server® 2012 Unleashed

Retiring “Phantom” DCs

As is often the case in Active Directory, DCs might have been removed from the forest without first being demoted. They become phantom DCs and basically haunt the Active Directory, causing strange errors to pop up every so often. This is because of a couple remnants in the Active Directory, specifically the NTDS Settings object and the SYSVOL replication object. These phantom DCs might come about because of server failure or problems in the administrative process, but you should remove those servers and remnant objects from the directory to complete the upgrade to Windows Server 2012. Not doing so will result in errors in the event logs and in the DCDIAG output as well as potentially prevent raising the domain and forest ...