We had our only domain controller suffer hardware failure and completely lost our Active Directory. After many days, we have AD reinstalled and are beginning reconstruction.
Our DC is server 2003 std. We have (had) an Exchange 2007 running on our network. Against "best practices" this server is also running other workloads. Since our "old" AD no longer exists, our Exchange services will not start. We also cannot run the "uninstall" procedure, as it routinely errors-out "cannot find Exchange server exchange.domain.com".
The prospect of even more downtime, offloading all data from this server, reinstalling from scratch, and reinstalling all of our other applications is too much for the IT team and management to bear. We are looking for a way to forcibly uninstall Exchange from the existing server so that we may reinstall it – or we are looking for a way to "repair" our Exchange installation for use with our new AD.
Thank you for any help.
Best Answer
tbh it sounds like in trying to save time/resources you are making it so akward that it will cost you far more than you saved. I hope that is a valuable lesson to not cut corners and also the importance of backups. Many an administrator before you including myself has learnt that the hard way.
You should have been able to restore your DC from backup at worst into a virtual machine on a server that does something else - but I take it you have no backups or you wouldn't be asking this.
Unfortunately I think the best answer is what you have already suggested of wiping it off and reinstalling windows and exchange. You do realise that your addresses, mailboxes, etc. are stored in AD and not exchange? So you are going to have to set them all up again anyway.
Messing around with the registry to get rid of it is really asking for trouble and just going to end up with an unstable system that you need to reinstall in the end. Better to get on and do it now than to waste a whole bunch of time trying to avoid it and then end up having to do it anyway.
I know that's probably not the answer you want to hear but I would be surprised if someone has a magic button solution that doesn't involve installing exchange anywhere.
Of course that is unless you have somewhere else to setup a VM and do the temp exchange install described which would be far less painful.