Properly Handling an EBS 2008 Setup Failure

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Shawn Sullivan]

If EBS setup encounters a fatal error and cannot continue, you will be presented with the following window once you cancel:

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Figure 1: Installation not finished

Note the warning: Do not manually delete any objects or settings in Active Directory. The Windows Essential Business Server Installation Wizard handles all of the necessary cleanup tasks for Active Directory objects and settings. By deleting objects and settings yourself, you could unintentionally damage the Active Directory environment required by Windows Essential Business Server.

Configuration information for your EBS environment is written to and read from the MMSConfiguration container in Active Directory, including the status of each server setup. EBS setup uses this information to determine if you are running as a clean install, as a recovery from a failed setup, or as a replacement mode install.

If setup encounters a fatal error, you will be required to fix the root cause of the failure, format the machine, and reinstall. After the domain join portion, all of the proper cleanup steps will be performed automatically before proceeding.

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Figure 2: Clean up an incomplete installation

If you have not followed the instructions and decide to manually perform cleanup steps after setup fails, like running dcpromo and removing computer objects in Active Directory, you will cause a condition during domain join where EBS setup is expecting to find the computer object in Active Directory that doesn’t exist. This will result in the following errors:

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Figure 3: Domain Join Error: Setup failed to find the server : <> in Active Directory.

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Figure 4: The DNS query for <> did not complete, because a DNS server could not be contacted

If you are in this situation, you can restore the computer object using ADRestore from Sysinternals:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963906.aspx

Launch ADRestore from the Management server with the following syntax:

Adrestore –r <MessagingServerName>

For example:

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Figure 4: Restoring the computer object

At this point, you must format and reinstall the failed server and allow EBS setup to perform the proper cleanup steps.