[hx40r]

Hello,
I ran dcpromo to install Active Directory after manually installing the DNS server ( static IP). I got the message that AD was successfully installed. When I did a nslookup, everything looked fine. My nightmare started when I rebooted the system. The system started up but sat at 'preparing network connections...' forever. I tried rebooting and redoing everything all over more than 10 times without much luck. I'm running into the same difficulty. I don't know what I'm missing here and it's very frustrating. Has anybody bumped into the same headache before? What is causing the headache and how to go about fixing it?
Thank you in advance for your feedback.

[Dumber]

And how long did you wait before resetting the machine?
I know that when the Windows firewall is enabled or DNS is not functioning correctly you can wait really a long long time.

[Garen]

This is normal. AD relies on DNS and DNS relies on AD, when both roles are on the same machine they lag and lag until they timeout.

Setup a secondary DNS or set the primary DNS to another server.

[hx40r]

Thanks to Meekrobe and Dumber for the feedbacks. The comments helped me better grasp what was going on. I problem was being caused by the fact the server has two active NICs. After disabling one of the NICs, the problem was solved and the wait time was brought down to about 2-3 minutes. It was an infinite wait before. So, my nightmare is over for the time being. I have the primary and the secondary DC up and running now. Thank you once again!

[joeqwerty]

Yep. That's a known issue with multihomed DC's.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/272294

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/191611/

[Dumber]

Ahhh. You didn't mentioned that the server have multiple Network cards.
If you have told this in the first place I also could tell you that this is a known issue