Hello,
I was in the process of migrating 2 DC's (DC1 & DC2) Server 2003 to Server 2008 R2 Standard. In the process of all this I prepared the Forest and Domain and had successfully added the first 2008 R2 DC (DC3). I turned off DC1 because it had crashed and was forced to seize the roles over to DC2. I deleted all the records from DNS and used ntdsutil Metadata cleanup as suggested on several Microsoft sites. D2 & DC3 were working fine and replicating without a problem. I decided to take a snapshot of DC2 because I needed to change the name of DC3 to newDC1 in an effort to keep consistent with our naming conventions. When I changed the name to newDC1, it stopped replicating with DC2 and DC2 was no longer working either leaving us without any DCs. After troubleshooting for days, we decided it would be easier to delete newDC1 from our VCenter Server and start all over by reverting to the snapshot from DC2. Here is where the major problem began! When I am trying to promote the newDC1 newly created, it gives me this error:
"The operation failed: A domain controller could not be contacted for the domain xxx that contained an account for this computer.Make the computer a member of a workgroup then rejoin domain before trying the promotion. Access denied."