How old is my Active Directory Forest?

It’s sometimes interesting to know how old your AD forest is and when the various domains were created. I recently came across a really useful TechNet Blog with a Powershell snippet to do just this. My version shown below just has some slightly different formatting.

# How old is the forest?
Get-ADObject -SearchBase (Get-ADForest).PartitionsContainer `
-LDAPFilter "(&(objectClass=crossRef)(systemFlags=3))" `
-pr dnsRoot, nETBIOSName, whenCreated | Sort whenCreated `
| select @{e={($_.DNSRoot)};l=”DomainFQDN”}, `
nETBIOSName, @{e={(get-date $_.whencreated -format dd/MM/yyyy)};l=”whenCreated”} `
| ft -AutoSize

The output should look something like this: