Dead DC Removal

There is a catch-22 you get into if you try to properly remove a domain controller when it has failed completely - either it is dead, or because of massive corruption it might as well be.

The funny thing is that in the tools ms recommends for this job you have to connect to the DC in question in order to demote it or cleanup its entries in AD. Silly. I finally found an answer though...

If this dead controller is one of your operations masters, well - good luck. If not, then you will need the tool ldp.exe. I hadn't seen this one before, but it basically allows you to edit the domain ADSI containers. The details are here:

http://computing.fusion13.com/ActiveDirectory/Remove-A-Domain-Controller-From-Active-Directory-With-LDP.shtml

Follow this post, and the dead server is gone. Other articles indicate that when you rebuild the machine, you should use a new name due to cached values on machines throughout the domain.