When performing an upgrade from Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 to SBS 2008 in migration mode the process stops and you receive the following error:

The user account does not have the permissions that it needs to join to the domain. The user account must me a member of the Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins, and Schema Admins groups.

Resolution

When using the answer file for the SBS 2008 migration, the account that you create to authorize this migration must be a member of the Domain Admins, Enterprise Admins, and Schema Admins groups.

However, what they fail to tell you is that none of those groups can be set as Primary Group on the user’s AD object. You must add the user to the Domain Users group, in addition to the Enterprise Admins, and Schema Admins groups, and set Domain Users as the primary group. As soon as you do so the migration will succeed.

Grr.

Posted by Peter Braitsch in Technical on 11 August 2009. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.