Wednesday 4 August 2010

SBS Migration – Exchange 2003 Uninstall on Source Failed. Now what?

In one of our migrations that we were running using the Microsoft method, the Exchange 2003 server decided to choke during the uninstall.

When that happened, we reran the uninstall process via Add/Remove Programs and the process seemingly continued though with a number of click through errors.

Once the “uninstall” process completed we rebooted the source SBS 2003 just in case.

When we ran the Microsoft Exchange Best Practices Analyzer from within the Exchange Management Console on the destination server, the first thing we noticed was the presence of the source SBS in the First Storage Group.

Unfortunately, it is not a simple process to clean the source server out of the group on the destination server . . . at least for those of us that have not spent too much time with Exchange PowerShell.

So, we ended up needing to run the Exchange 2003 install routine off of SBS 2003 CD2 on an XP Pro SP3 workstation and install the Exchange Management Tools. Once installed, Exchange Server SP2 was required to bring the tools up to speed.

We then right clicked on the Exchange Management Console and clicked Run As choosing the new SBS domain admin account to authenticate with.

After expanding the First Administrative Group node down to the Members folder under Routing Groups we saw:

image

The offending source server.

Right click on the server and left click on Delete to finally remove the server.

_Under no conditions should the First Administrative Group be deleted_

We then reran the Microsoft Exchange Best Practices Analyzer tool on the destination tool and was greeted with an empty First Administrative Group when beginning a scan.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer

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