Adprep fails when migrating SBS 2003 to SBS 2008

If you’re following the Microsoft paper to migrate SBS 2003 to SBS 2008, at one point you’ll be using the Migration Tool to prepare your SBS 2003 server (Or “Source Server”) for the migration. 

At this point, you can run into the problem that preparing the AD scheme fails.  You’ll see an Adprep error.  This can be because of two reasons.  Two can be found in a Microsoft KB article (Don’t have the link, sorry), but the third one isn’t documented.  The reason for this might be that it’s a problem only non-English peeps (like me) can run into.

Research has taught me that the Migration File will fail when you’re using different versions of SBS.  Make sure that your SBS 2003 you’re using; and the SBS 2008 server you’re going to use, are of the same language!  As stupid as this might sound, this problem bugged me for hours.  Of course, it also didn’t help that, in order to “solve” this problem I downloaded the Dutch version of SBS 2008, assuming that:

  1. I was running a Dutch SBS 2008
  2. The SBS 2008 DVD I was using was English. 

Neither was true, of course.  I hope that this post will save you the valuable time that I lost on this problem. 

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