The pain of a screwed up Exchange 2007 UM Role – Error 1603 – Event 1002

Right then, another one for the memory banks….

Today we had to install SP2 on Exchange 2007 sitting atop of Windows 2003 X64.   During the installation of Exchange 2007 we got the following error first:

Exchange Server component Unified Messaging Server Role failed.

Unable to remove product with code 84a6e864-10a5-47c0-ac31-426fe71e4906. Fatal error during installation. Error code is 1603. Last error reported by the .msi package is ‘There is a problem with this Windows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected.

Grand, I have seen this before.   It was due to the Unified Messaging Role not actually being correct.   Last time I had this we simply deleted the “Action” and “WaterMark” keys in the registry, reinstalled Exchange SP2 and all was good.   However, not this time!

The errors continued……     On trying to uninstall the UM role from Add/Remove Programs we got this error:

Unable to remote product with code cef60964–21ae-47e0–93c6–611aa8941b7f. Fatal error during installation. Error code is 1603. Last error reported by the .msi package is ‘Could not find any previously installed compliant products on the machine for installing this product’

Joy….   Not.

So….   then I simply figured I would take the following action….   Lets rip this UM role out the hard way….

(BACKUP FIRST!)

Kick up ADSIEdit and go to ADSIEDIT->Configuration -> Services -> Microsoft Exchange -> [Org Name] -> Administrative Groups -> Administrative Group Name -> Servers-> [server name] -> Properties and look for the attribute msExchCurrentServerRoles

Edit this and subtract the UM Role Value (16) from the currently set value (54).   So 54–16=38

Enter that value (38)

Reboot the server….

Reinstall the service pack…..

Worked for me anyway!