Upgrade from win2k server to 2003 sevrer

Archived from groups: microsoft.public.win2000.setup_upgrade (More info?)

Hello there,

Hopefully someone out there will be able to give me some pointers on what we
are trying to do.

We are a smallish school who have a network consisting of about 200 clients
and about 600 users, all of which have their userdrives stored on the central
server (total storgae used is about 120 Gig). The 2000 server is very slow
at the moment so we are about to purchase a new server with 2003
preinstalled, but we are looking for the best way to get everything off one
server and onto the other. We have spoken to quite a few people, all of
which have given conflicting views on how to go about this. Some people have
advised using tools such as adduser and xcacls for populating AD on the 2003
server and assigning user permissions for homedrives etc (obviously after
running adprep and forestprep), but some have mentioned other tools by Hyena
that do the same thing (amongst other things)

What we really want to know is how to go about this in the most
less-complicated way. We are also aware that we have to transfer FSMO roles
amongst other things, and we are assuming that we can jsut create a new scope
once up and running for DHCP and that DNS and WINS will just work once
installed. Are we corect in thinking this?

Myself and my colleagues have tried looking through TEchnet and other
resources online but all the help seems to be conflicting and there doesnt
seem to be anywhere that tells you exactly how to do what we want to do in
meaningful steps. Surely thousands of people have had to do this since 2003
server was released, but no-one's seemed to have documented the best
practices involved!??!

I would really appreciate some help or pointers to any other online
resources or texts.

many thanks