1:00 AM
Paul B
You ever go to patch a server late one evening, after hours so as not to bother the users, and after about two hours into the upgrade everything goes to hell in a hand basket? Good, so I’m not the only one. In fact, you are probably reading this right now because of that very same scenario.
Anyhoo, so what happened to me was I finally got around to upgrading my Exchange 2010 server to Service Pack 1. When running through the install everything checked out. All perquisites were green, and so I proceeded with the upgrade. Everything was going well until it got to the Unified Messaging Role. About 75% in the install failed with the following error:
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. Contact your support personnel or package vendor.
WTF!? I figured it was just a fluke, so I rebooted and tried the upgrade again with the same issue. The real sucky part was that the upgrade up to the failure took about 3 hours! That was 6 hours of my life wasted! Plus I had to work on this sucker until about 4am. I was friggin’ tired! Anyway, despite the failed upgrade, Exchange still worked so I went to bed, and showed up late to work the next day.
When I finally got to work, I started researching and could find nothing online about how to fix this for Exchange 2010. I did find some useful things related to Exchange 2007 though. It wasn’t quick enough though because I found out that since the pooched upgrade, voicemail no longer was working. Shit! I needed to fix this fast! Here is what I had to do.
First I had to trick Exchange into thinking that Unified Messaging wasn’t installed. To do that, I followed the advice of Nick Whittome of The Naked MVP:
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…..
That fixed the first problem. It got the upgrade to complete, but Unified Messaging was still broken. In order to upgrade it, I first had to remove it. To do that I had to undo what we did in the last section and in ADSI Edit set the msExchCurrentServerRoles value back to 54, then reboot Exchange.
Then I had to go into the registry on Exchange using regedit and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v14\UnifiedMessagingRole and delete the "Action"="BuildToBuildUpgrade" key.
After that, from Programs and Features I was able to uninstall Unified Messaging. Once it was removed, I rebooted again for good measure then using a slip-streamed version of Exchange 2010 with SP1, I ran the following from the root of the install media:
setup.com /mode:Install /roles:UM
Boom! Everything was right as rain again! Exchange 2010 was fully upgraded to Service Pack 1!
Did you have a similar issue with your Exchange 2010 SP1 upgrade? Did you fix it differently? What did you do that worked? Let us know in the comments.
