Exchange 2007 SP2 goes wrong

Exchange 2007 has the feature of reinstalling a server the exact way it was when it was operational. I ran into an issue in my development environment where I had to reinstall the server from scratch because it would not uninstall exchange 2007 or upgrade to Service Pack 2. Because this was a dev server I simply reinstalled the server from scratch. Installed Windows updates, I should also mention the server has to be the exact name it had before and was rejoined to the domain.

The first step I performed was putting in the Exchange 2007 CD and open up a command prompt

Change directory to CD drive, in my case the CDROM is D drive.

Type in the following command

setup /mode:recoverserver

In my case, I was missing patches that were needed by exchange installation. I visited Microsoft website plugged in all Error ID’s and download the needed software, but as you can see from the output it knows the exact way this server setup before.
After installing needed patches, I begain to run the command setup /mode:recoverserver again. As you can see from the output screen still no luck.

I searched for a bit on Google and had no luck with fixing this issue, so I decided to go to Plan B, I would force remove the server from active directory and reinstall exchange.

I Lunched ASEDIT, and added Configuration

I Click on Plus sign next to Configuration, CN=Services, CN=Microsoft Exchange, CN=DomainName, CN=Exchange Administraive Groups, CN=Servers

Here I delete the server having issues.

I got a prompt and clicked on Yes to continue

I got a warning stating you will be deleting the container and everything in it. I clicked on yes to continue.

I notice exchange wrote that my server was in recover mode because when I ran the installation again it told me I had to do a server recovery. I went to control panel and clicked on add remove programs and notice exchange installation was presient. I click on remove and uninstalled it. After this I check registry on the server and notice the registry and was still there, so I decided to remove it.

I Launched Regedit

Navigate to
+HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
+SOFTWARE
+MICROSOFT

Here I deleted the +EXCHANGE folder

After this I had to reboot my server because exchange was complaining that it has to reboot before starting any new installation.

Now I ran into a weird installation issue, my Default Offline Address Book was corrupted. Got this error during installation

I proceeded to delete it and recreate it with the following power shell commands.

[PS] C:\>Remove-OfflineAddressBook "Default offline address book"

Confirm
Are you sure you want to perform this action?
Removing Offline Address Book "Default offline address book".
[Y] Yes  [A] Yes to All  [N] No  [L] No to All  [S] Suspend  [?] Help
(default is "Y"):y

Confirm
The offline address book that you selected for removal is the default offline
address book. If you continue, Outlook users may not be able to access their
offline address books.  Are you sure you want to delete Default offline address
book?
[Y] Yes  [A] Yes to All  [N] No  [L] No to All  [S] Suspend  [?] Help
(default is "Y"):y

[PS] C:\>New-OfflineAddressBook "default offline address list" -AddressLists "default global address list" -Server exmbx01

After this, I was finally able to install exchange successfully.

This entry was posted on January 8, 2010 at January 8, 2010 and is filed under Exchange. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.