SBS 2008 Migrations Fail When The Migration Preparation Tool Has Not Been Run

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[Today’s post comes to us courtesy of John Bay and Shawn Sullivan]

We have recently received a number of support calls where migrations to SBS 2008 are failing, particularly with Exchange setup, because customers are not running the Migration Preparation Tool on the SBS 2003 server prior to beginning the migration process. This tool performs the following actions:

  1. Installs update 943494 on the SBS 2003 server to extend the migration grace period from 7 to 21 days.
  2. Runs ADPREP to update the forest, domain, and group policy object access control entries.
  3. Changes Exchange 2003 from Mixed mode to Native mode.
  4. Adds the Authenticated Users group to the Pre-Windows 2000 security group.

If you attempt to perform a migration install of SBS 2008 before running the Migration Preparation Tool you will receive the following error:

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The problem that we are seeing is that customers are manually running ADPREP and accepting the warnings to get past this error instead of running the Migration Preparation Tool. While running ADPREP manually will allows the SBS 2008 install to begin, your Exchange server will still be running in mixed mode which will cause the Exchange 2007 install on SBS 2008 to fail as seen below.

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You will also see the following error in the ExchangeSetup.log, located under C:\ExchangeSetupLogs:

[12/10/2008 10:48:20 PM] [0] Setup will run the task 'test-setuphealth'

[12/10/2008 10:48:20 PM] [1] Setup launched task 'test-setuphealth -DomainController 'SERVER.domain.local' -DownloadConfigurationUpdates $true -ExchangeVersion '8.1.240.6' -Roles 'Global' -ScanType 'PrecheckInstall' -SetupRoles 'Global' -PrepareDomain $null -PrepareLegacyExchangePermissions $null -PrepareOrganization $true -PrepareSchema $true'

[12/10/2008 10:48:20 PM] [1] Beginning processing.

[12/10/2008 10:48:46 PM] [1] [ERROR] The Exchange organization is not in native mode.

At this point, you must restore the SBS 2003 server from backup and run the Migration Preparation Tool on the SBS 2003 server before beginning the migration again.

For more information on all of the pre-migration steps that must be performed, including steps on how to run the Migration Preparation Tool, please see https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc527611.aspx