Exchange sp2 installation failed

Hi There,

This article is in English this time, it’s just easier because of the technical stuff. Besides it’s regarding an failing installation of Microsoft Exchange Server SP2 on Exchange Server 2010.

First of all my colleague started the installation of Microsoft Exchange SP2 on the Exchange server. This one failed with an error 1603. After rebooting the server and trying a reinstall again the setup mentioned that there was no exchange installation anymore…

Still, with finished back-ups behind we wanted to fix the server. The night would be very short to completely recover the server.

After some experimenting with de domain\administrator account, still no luck. There was no way to fix this and Exchange just can’t be re-installed (like office).

Another option was to use:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd876880.aspx

but that wasn’t mentioned to be run on the same server. But if we could just suppose we weren’t on a server where was already Exchange installed on….
I went into the registry, navigating to [HKEY_LOCALMACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\V14]

I was looking around and back-upped everything to a .reg file. Now, we start exchange recovery!

“D:\Exchange Server 2010 Enterprise SP1\setup.com” /m:recoverserver /targetdir:”D:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14″ /donotstartTransport

The last option is to not start the transport services after reinstalling.
This worked out a little, it started and ended up with an error that the installation could not be found.
All right, below the earlier mentioned registry key I removed everything what started with “Setup” (Setup and Setup-save in my case).
And now it seems to started running….. and some little further, fail!
Hmmm, maybe we should try the same level (instead of installing from sp2 we just use SP1, the version we came from).

After starting setup, it directly fails. Reboot machine, no luck.
After looking at the registry i found that below the V14 key all the roles have their own key like “HubTransportRole”, “ClientAccessRole”, and so on. I also found out that when i removed everything, loaded the earlier made back-up, deleted the setup and setup-save key I was able to take a new shot at the disaster recovery installation.

But sadly enough, it still fails.

After doing this trick i suddenly noticed in  <system drive>\ExchangeSetupLogs\ExchangeSetup.log that the installer could not enable some services:

“Set-Service RemoteRegistry -StartupType Automatic”

after checking it seemed the services of exchange where configured to “disabled”. After changing this the setup continued further on but still couldn’t finish.

In the meantime it appears that the exchange server wasn’t a member anymore of the “exchange servers” and “exchange domain servers” group anymore. We recovered those and check the other default exchange 2010 memberships. Those were fine.
Now we going fast trough some other errors:

[ERROR] The registry key “SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v14\Transport” does not exist under “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE”.

restore the key from the back-up registry and do the trick again.

now we get:

[ERROR] The following error was generated when “$error.Clear();
Set-LocalPermissions -Feature:”Bridgehead”” was run:”The registry key “SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v14\Transport” does not exist under “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE”.”.

When that one was recovered it finally went on further but ended with another error.
What i also found out that on the roles that where successfully there where no errors, only at the “HubTransportRole” when i deep dived into it’s registry key i found out that there was a key like:

“watermark”…..

After removing the key it wasn’t necessary to back-up and restore the keys every time to test :)

Now i could start the setup even more easier and it quickly came out that the issues was with the HubTransportRole. Now we wanted to aim the setup only on this one, we can easily do this by change the installation/setup command line:

“D:\Exchange Server 2010 Enterprise SP1\setup.com” /m:recoverserver /role:HubTransport /targetdir:”D:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14″ /donotstartTransport

now it was clear, the error was with this one. But new SP2 installation was mentioning it was hanging in disaster recovery mode…..??!?!

What hooks up in transport role? Right Antispam and Antivirus solutions. So i directly removed those two, but no. Still not going :(

After searching further i found also a registry key named “Disasterrecovery” below the “Hubtransport” key. After removing this one the setup seems to continue on fine! Right, directly start the SP2 installation. And also this one worked fine (all right, except on the back-up agent which was holding files. After killing this one it finished perfectly).

Now it’s time for testing!!! and it seemed not to be working. Searching the log files learned that we had an issue with exppw.dll located under:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\ClientAccess\Owa\auth\exppw.dll

now you can change the IIS to allow 32bit applications, it still fails. I also read articles changing the app-pool and changing the:

C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\config\applicationHost.config

and specify the file with the x64 switch but this only brought me further away from home. This regards also the modules option within IIS, after all it went fine but testing learned a lot. Also how it _SHOULD_ really be configured. Read more on:

https://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2010/02/04/3409289.aspx

When restoring this one more and more started to work, i even got a working Exchange again!
Still got an event 5000:

Unable to initialize the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service.   – Error 0x80004005.

and an EMC error:

Error connecting to “Server XY/powershell” using kerberos. Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client cannot process the request. It cannot determine the content type of the HTTP response from the destination computer. The content type is absent or invalid.
Connecting to remote server failed with the following error message : The WinRM client cannot process the request. It cannot determine the content type of the HTTP response from the destination computer. The content type is absent or invalid.

but after restoring the Kerberauth.dll in local mode under the sub-site powershell in iis (see earlier mentioned link) even this one went away.

Testing!!!! hmpf, still not working :(
What seems, message are hanging in “outbox”. Check the Microsoft Exchange Transport service on the Exchange server and this one is starting, running for 2 minutes, and finally fales.

After some searching i found the magical (Powershell) commands:

get-transportagent
Disable-TransportAgent
and last, but not least,
get-transportpipeline

What seems to be, the GFI and NOD32 left some Transport agents behind, but as they could not be loaded anymore (the dll’s where gone) the transport service failed. With these commands you can strip down, change priority, or eventually disable the transport agent.

After disabling all overhead even it was still not working. No, off course, in a 1200 mailbox environment you got some back-queuing, just sit down and wait. And the service was running fine and queues went smaller and smaller.

Now it’s all working, have a good night.

Some event’s which passed by:

Event 5000
Event 1150
Event 2280
Event 1310

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