Was working on my Wave 15 lab materials early this morning when my Exchange 2013’s IIS just crashed on me. Which resulted I need to rebuild the whole Exchange Virtual machine (too bothersome to troubleshoot as I was running short of time). So as quickly as possible, I’ve wipe out the Operating System disk and recreate a differencing disk (the beauty of Hyper-V, saves me plenty of time of copying a sysprep VHD :))

Once the machine is booted, I’d attempted to rebuild the Exchange by using the /m:RecoverServer cmdlet but failed as I’ve accidentally wiped the Databases File as well (sheessh). So I’d to re-run the entire installation process. However, any obstacle had “bestowed” upon me when the Setup detects that the Exchange was previously installed with Exchange and didn’t allow me to proceed with it.

So my next step to quickly resolve this matter (please don’t do this in the production!):

  • Run ADSIedit
  • Anchor to the Services under the Configuration Container (CN=Configuration, DC=Domain, DC=com)
  • Locate & delete every single object within Microsoft Exchange & Microsoft Exchange Autodiscover

Exchange 2013 Rebuild 01

Next reboot the machine and re-run the installer; another problem hit me.

Run the pre-requisites check, a bunch of permissions issues was thrown, namely that my account wasn’t part of the Organization Management Security Group & Enterprise Admin Security Group although the account is still intact with those groups. Hence I decided to re-run Prepare Schema & Prepare AD just to confirm. This time, a different error was thrown, from the Exchange Setup Log, this was capture:

[ERROR] Setup encountered a problem while validating the state of Active Directory: Couldn’t Find the Enterprise Organization container

And after searching a bit, I found an article which helped: Duplicate Microsoft Exchange System Objects container exists in Active Directory. Within the ADUC, I’d deleted the entire container Microsoft Exchange System Objects

Exchange 2013 Rebuild 02

Walla, once it’s deleted, the Setup can now proceed. :p

Updated [24th April 2013, 3.30PM]

OK, it seems that the above clean-up wasn’t sufficient and I was forced to start from scratch. It appears that someone has already blogged about it and I came to notice that this is not a supported method for Exchange clean-up: Exchange Clean-up

However, I hope it proves useful for those out there seeking for information and help 🙂