Restoring SystemState, breaking IIS and Exchange

I dug out an unused HDD and experimented with restoring my SystemState and Exchange backups the past 3 days.

Whilst I'm pleased to say the system still "works" after a restore, there are a number of big, bright-red "ERROR!" events logged in the System and Application event log, but hopefully nothing not solvable. Active Directory was correctly restored and fully operational afterwards.

But not Exchange.

Here are the steps I took:

• Made a SystemState backup from a Windows Server 2003 SP2 system
  • Which is also a:
    • Domain Controller
    • IIS Box
    • Exchange Server
    • SQL Server 2000
    • Terminal Server - Application Mode
    • Fileserver NAS
    • All on 512MB RAM (it worked fine with 256MB of RAM a year ago)
      
• Replaced the system's HDD with a spare one I had lying around
• Installed a new installation of Windows Server 2003 on said drive
• Patched it to SP2 and installed other patches and IE7
• Restored the SystemState backup

It is worth pointing out that at this stage the IIS Admin MMC snap-in fails to load, or when it does load, it doesn't list anything, or when it does list something, it doesn't list anything besides NNTP.

But then I wanted to test the state of my Exchange backups, so I attempted to reinstall Exchange. Exchange setup said it was already installed so I would need to reinstall. I went along with this.

But Exchange Setup threw a wobbly since IIS was corrupted. So I went to the Add/Remove Windows Components wizard and totally removed the Application Server checkbox, rebooted, then reinstalled IIS, NNTP, SMTP, W3SVC, and the rest that goes with it.

No dice. IIS Admin takes ages to boot up then doesn't display anything and Exchange Setup still complains.

This is nice to know, in the unlikely event of a real server meltdown my emails are screwed, despite having backups. (Although I could set up a virtualised server elsewhere, make it join the domain, then install Exchange on that and restore my emails there).

I'm going to see what happens if I restore earlier emails onto a cloned copy of my working Windows Server installation, but does anyone have any tips for a successful Windows Server brain transplant?

So the real issue is still IIS, no?  Once that is fixed, you should be able to reinstall Exchange without any issues.

What errors/warnings are being logged in the App log related to IIS?

The steps you took sound like they should work just fine.

tribalcactus wrote:



So the real issue is still IIS, no?  Once that is fixed, you should be able to reinstall Exchange without any issues.

What errors/warnings are being logged in the App log related to IIS?

The steps you took sound like they should work just fine.

I've since wiped the system (again), but this is from memory:

• The sound codec devices (Device Manager > Sound, video, and game controllers > { Audio Codecs, Legacy Audio Drivers, Legacy Video Capture Devices, Media Control Devices, Video Codecs } ) were all corrupted with the Yellow Warning triangle
• At startup I got the error message about a service or driver not starting.
  • One was a COM application somewhere, as noted in the event log
  • The other, I guess, was said audio codecs
• There were loads of shell and profile based issues since I wasn't working with the original Documents and Settings dir
• There was an error message I got when I opened IIS Admin once, but I've forgotten the exact text, but after googling it, it looked like a COM+ issue

This is also why I hate COM