Looking for some assistance. I demoted a 2008 R2 DC at one of our branches because it was tombstoned. I had to forcefully demote the DC. I performed a metadata cleanup afterwards to remove the DC from AD. I checked through AD after and removed any traces in sites and services and DNS.
The demoted DC is now part of a workgroup, but still has the DNS and DHCP server roles. I was hoping to re-promote the DC and DNS/DHCP would not be impacted (did some research on this and determined that it would not be an issue).
I'm not able to promote the server back to a DC because it can't reach the domain. The DNS settings point to 2 other active DNS servers on our network at another branch. I can ping with IP but no hostname. I also tried to join the server to the domain as a member server and it's also not able to reach the domain to join. I have manually changed the DNS suffix and also created an A-record in DNS for the host.
The caveat here is that the server is running 2008 core. It makes troubleshooting this issue a bit tricky.
Any assistance would be GREATLY appreciated!