I have been testing Windows 2012 AD in a non-prod environment. After a few months, I was finished with the testing so I wanted to demote the DCs to retire the test domain. I had 2 DCs, both Server Core and used dcpromo on each of them to do the demotion. I used the "/AdministratorPassword" switch and I carefully entered the password, which is one that I am very familiar with, and of course it's visible on the screen so I could see that it was correct.
On each of these former DCs, I was unable to log on using the local administrator account after the demotion. The message was that the password was incorrect. On the first one it wasn't much of a problem since it was still a domain member, but being that the second one was the last DC in the domain, I am unable to log on to the server at all. Fortunately this is not a production server, but I would still like to be able to use it.
Has anyone else come across this? I realize that dcpromo is deprecated, but I don't think that means unsupported. If it happened just once, I might have to accept that I typoed, but it happened on both of them and I used a password that I have used regularly in my test environment for years. Just recently I did the exact same thing to two Windows 2008 R2 DCs and I didn't have this problem.
Thanks in advance for any confirmations that this is a problem for others, or ideas as to what may have happened.
Cheers.
