Its not something I do very often, but I had to replace a windows 2k3 server with a new 2008 one today. When running dcpromo I kept getting the same error, something along the lines of “Failed installing active diretory service binaries, failed with error: the remote procedure call failed.”.
There was nothing in the logs giving much away, but I did see that TrustedInstaller.exe kept crashing! Because of the RPC error I went down that route, checking the servers could communicate properly and that I had sufficient access rights for running dcpromo.
After a few hours messing around, I tried to run a windows update and got an error about being out of space. The server was only 10% full!!? This led me to the problem, it turns out the windows update service and dcpromo run under the same user, which has a quota of only 3GB. I increased the quota to 80gb and hey presto, I had a new domain controller on the domain! 🙂