Sunday, April 22, 2007

Having Trouble to Uninstall Exchange



I hear you trying to decommission your exchange server nothing seems to be there, when you look at the mail store from ESM, no user mailbox at all, so why exchange is complaining about?

The exchange is integrated with active directory heavily as well as DNS.
When a server needs to be decommissioned and cannot due to user mailboxes still exit on the server

In ESM however there is no user mailbox at all, so why exchange is no uninstalling why Exchange is complaining with similar error below

When remove exchange with exchange wizard error occurred "The component "Microsoft Exchange Messaging and collaboration Services" Cannot be assigned the action "Remove" because:

- one or more users currently use a mailbox store on this server. This user must be moved to mailbox store on a different Server or be mail disabled before uninstalling this server


There is a user somewhere within AD, and your Exchange is reading that information from your Active directory, NTDS.DIT database.


Now we need to find out which object is still has a partial information pointing to this exchange server we wish to remove from out Mail organization
Lets fire up, ADUC

  • Start run
  • Dsa.msc

  • Right-click the domain container, and then click Find ( or click on the find icon on top left)
  • Select the Advanced tab
  • Select User from the Field button
  • From the list of attributes displayed, choose Exchange Home Server
  • Set the Condition field to Ends With
  • Enter the Exchange server name into the Value field ( server you are trying to get rid of)
  • Click Add
  • Click the Find
  • Make a right Click and Delete all those found in the search
  • Go back and kick of uninstall process one more time



    Best


    Oz Ozugurlu

11 comments:

Unknown said...

hi dude...

i having a problem to uninstall my legacy exchange server (E2K3). Belwo are the error message that i received :
'You do not have sufficient permissions in the domain. A domain Administrator must either re-run "Setup/domainprep" or create Recipient Update Service for the domain'.

The scenario here is i need to decommission the legacy exchange from the organization which we already have E2K7 up and running.

Kindly help us on this problem...

Anonymous said...

Oz Ozugurlu, your response worked for me. Thanks for the comment.

Anonymous said...

Perfect!! This was just what I needed to find out why I couldn't uninstall exchange 2003 from the old servers (even though all mailboxes, stores, and storage groups were deleted) when performing a transition to exchange 2007. Per your instructions I found a few accounts that didn't have mailboxes, but still had some old exchange attributes. I used the exchange tasks through ADUC to remove exchange attributes from these accounts. (rather than delete the non-mail-enabled accounts like you say to do) Thanks for the post!

Anonymous said...

Vincent, thanks a lot !!!!
Your comment was very helpfull. I used it for my uninstallation exchange server 2003.

Anonymous said...

This article was spot on and great help.....thanks very much

Anonymous said...

Thanks that works for me

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www.my-it.co.il

Anonymous said...

If only I'd found this earlier! Worked great for me. Thanks for your help :-)

Unknown said...

I received this error: "The component "Microsoft Exchange Messaging and Collaboration Services" cannot be assigned the action "Remove" because: -One or more users currently use a mailbox store on this server..." - I used ADUC to search for mailbox enabled users and mail enabled Public Folders, all were already deleted yet I still received this error when trying to uninstall. I scoured Googled articles looking for solutions...none of the MS or BLOG supplied solutions worked...finaly I tried a custom ADSIEDIT querey and this identified 2 objects that had the MSHomeMDB attribute manually set to my Exchange server! Here's the syntax of the ADSIEDIT queury:
(&(objectCategory=user)(msExchHomeServerName=*))

Anonymous said...

Vincent - thanks very much this worked for me - much better search than some of the others I tried i.e. LDP.exe ADUC home server column

Best wishes,
Craig

Anonymous said...

Worked like a charm, thanks for the help.

Anonymous said...

I could only find SystemMailbox under search results. Do I delete this??? and try to uninstall again?