Before I go any further I should say that this question involves both Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2000 DCs. I appreciate that Windows Server 2000 is no longer officially supported by Microsoft, however we have reached an impasse and I am hoping that someone here might be able to shed some light on the problem or provide some pointers.
We have a customer with a Windows Server 2000 forest (root domain plus one child domain) which is in the process of being upgraded to Windows Server 2008 R2. This is being done by introducing new Windows Server 2008 R2 DCs into the estate in the recommended fashion so that the old Win2K DCs can be retired. The schema has been successfully upgraded to the 2008 R2 one although the adprep process did cause a couple of the old DCs to bluescreen and reboot once. After this, two Win2K8R2 DCs were promoted into the root domain alongside the two existing ones. Again on running dcpromo to add the new 2008R2 DCs, the two existing 2000 DCs bluescreen'd and rebooted, but were stable after that.
The problem we now have is that any attempt to promote a new DC into the child domain causes the 'source' DC (the one that the new DC is trying to replicate from) to bluescreen repeatedly with stop code '0x01e', as well as any other DCs on the same site as the source DC. The Event logs and dcpromo log files are not particularly helpful. The dcpromo log shows the new DC 'securing files/folders' and then nothing else, and there's nothing telling in the System, FRS or DIrectory Services Event Logs. We even tried to promote a new Windows Server 2000 DC into the child domain just to check if Windows Server 2008 R2 was the problem, but the same thing happened, the dcpromo caused existing DCs to fall over!
I believe the problem is triggered at the point where the new DC attempts to start replicating SYSVOL from the source DC. To try and address this we have disabled Anti-Virus, and have also run chkdsk to ensure there is no file corruption, all without success. Is there anything else we should be looking at? SYSVOL does have a couple of morphedfolders, but we don't believe that's the issue because in a 'steady state' the existing DCs are happily replicating OK.Naturally the customer doesn't want any further changes made to the environment until we have got to the bottom of the problem.
Many thanks for any assistance.