"I am personally more comfortable with doing a new dcpromo on a virtual machine and then demote the physical (after if needed moved FSMO roles and changed all DNS pointers from clients). However, depending on the environment the DNS part could take some work to identify all static pointers to the old IP."
this is how I have been doing it, I just wanted to see if doing the active directory restore mode way is a reliable effective alternative to accomplish the conversion without USN rollback occuring?