Are you trying to uninstall exchange and yet to be successful, because exchange seems not to be happy and not willingly uninstall from the server? If your answer is yes, keep reading. The key thing to understand is, being able to see how exchange (Application) interacts with .DIT database (Active directory). So if the database tells exchange, "here are the mail enabled object that's mail box is on this server" you won't be able to un-install exchange, until you manually clean the .DIT database.
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
First way
- Open ADUC.MSC
- Click search on the drop down menu
- Select, exchange recipients, and make sure the first box is checked only (Users with exchange mailbox)
- Click storage, enable mail boxes on this server, select your server from menu,
- Click find now
- When you identify the mailboxes, either move it somewhere else or delete them
Second Way
(Looking for mail enabled object with the attribute called, Exchange Home Server)
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
Oz ozugurlu,
Systems Engineer
MCITP (EMA), MCITP (SA),
MCSE 2003 M+ S+ MCDST
Security Project+ Server+
oz@SMTp25.org
http://smtp25.blogspot.com (Blog)
4 comments:
I have used this process multiple times and it has worked. However, I have a server which when I do the searches returns no users still on it , yet I continue to get the message. Do you resort to a manual removal of Exchange?
Thanks for this Oz. The weird thing is that I had no users appearing in exchange and no users appearing with the first method. However when I ran the second query it pulled up four users. All of which were service accounts. When I tried to move the mailboxes I got a "There is no Connection Agreement configured to export this recipient to the Exchange 5.5 server" but right clicking the user, exchange tasks and removing the exchange attributes worked. I did need to restart the add/remove wizard and everything worked fine (until I had to go hunt for the exchange 2003 cd!)
Many thanks for your article - worked the treat!!!
Peter
Thanks a Lot OZ
It worked for me. I have successfully uninstalled exchange in my environment.
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