Exchange 2003 Woes - Please Halp

[sshaw]

Hi All,

 

Encountered a bizarre problem with my exchange 2003 box yesterday and I'm now fresh out ideas (well good ones anyway)

 

 

Had a server crash one of the DC's here yesterday, rebooted both DC's as well as the exchange box, everything was rosy until it came to starting specific processes within the exchange server.

 

System attendant claims to have started but the information store and mta stacks services both refuse to start.

 

Information Store returns error code 0 and then either hangs in a starting state or appears to be stopped still.

 

Event Viewer shows a couple of different error messages

 

Error 0x80004005 connecting to the Microsoft Active Directory

 

and

 

Unable to initialise the Microsoft Exchange Information Store Service

 

The web based front end for OWA still loads but hangs when you try and login )obviously!)

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

Exchange box is running sp2 with a couple of hotfixes installed

[DSapseid]

Hi,

 

I also have regular problems with my exchange server in that every time I reboot the sodding thing it refuses to start some if not all of the services!! I am replacing it in the summer anyway!

 

The error i get is something like 'The service did not start in a timely fashion' or something along those lines! The 'fix' that i have found for it is to turn off the exchange server, then manually delete the entries in DNS on both my DNS servers for the exchange server, then turn on the exchange server and all is working a'ok!!

 

Hope this helps.

 

Dan

[sshaw]

Nope, no joy. I'm sure its not dns. DNS records seem fine and DCs are contactable from the exchange box.

 

I've ran sfc /scannow to make sure all dll files are correct but I'm again having an issue with system attendant not starting and I'm sure thats whats causing the rest of the issues.

 

I start the process manually and it zooms to 50% started before stopping dead and taking a further 5/10 minutes to fail out with the 1053 timely manner error

 

*I HAVE RESOLVED THIS ISSUE*

 

For anybody interested, I have backed up the mdbdata folder (just in case) and done a reinstall of exchange 2003 and sp2, running /domainprep first and then re-running setup.

 

This has allowed me to remount the mailbox store and access emails again!!

 

Phew......

Edited April 23, 2009 by sshaw
Issue Resolved - Ammended Info