I just wanted to share this post from the “Ask Premier Field Engineering” blog: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/askpfeplat/2017/01/17/turn-on-that-scary-dc/
In the past I had clients with similar issues, but I’d removed the DC and done metadata cleanup as if it were a long lost irretrievable DC. What if there was a need to get data off of the orphan domain controller? I’d never run into that problem, but if you do, here’s a handy way to spin up a scary DC without blowing up AD.