We just got our new server in at school, a nice Dell Poweredge 1400. Nice machine, 800MHz, 36GB of disk space, nice stuff.

We get the machine in, and set up, and it completes the installation process (NT was already half preloaded), asking no questions, except oddly enough, to be on a workgroup or domain. Having not worked much with NT Server (I'm more a *nix fan), I just set it to workgroup temporarily, until I could get it set as a PDC later.

Great idea. Not gonna happen though.

To set up an NT Server as a PDC, it must be set that way BEFORE installation. Ours wasn't, it was set to be a server (by Dell).

To get it to BE a PDC, you have to reformat and reload all of NT Server again. There is no way to switch it from being just "a pc on the network with NT server," to a PDC, or even a BDC. You have to reload the entire OS and start over. Not suprising, as that's the typical Windows Certified Solution(tm) to anything that may be too difficult to solve otherwise.
That's pretty damn pathetic if you ask me... to think that NT admins just ACCEPT this...