Exchange Server 2013 setup fails creating Mailbox role

There I was installing Exchange Server 2013 on a brand new Windows 2012 Server. All the pre-reqs went on fine, AD Schema extended, no problems, how simple could it be?

And yet, the setup itself fails!?!? I can’t even begin to understand how a vanilla setups on a clean fresh server could fail.

So, during the setup, it gets to :Step 7 of 14: Mailbox Role: Transport Service” and then fails with

Error:

The following error was generated when “$error.Clear();

if ( ($server -eq $null) -and ($RoleIsDatacenter -ne $true) )

{

Update-RmsSharedIdentity -ServerName $RoleNetBIOSName

}

” was run: “Database is mandatory on UserMailbox. Property Name: Database”.

Looks like Microsoft *still* haven’t been able to work out how to provide actual useful error messages.

At least it appears to be a known error, and there’s a KB article describing it. Although for Exchange 2010 I figured it should be close enough.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/978776

So off to ADSIEDIT, delete the user as suggested. I can’t “recreate” the account because the powershell doesn’t work because Exchange isn’t installed yet! Next step is to rerun the  Mailbox role setup application… huh? What “application” would that be?

I tried just running the Setup again. It starts, tells me the previous setup failed and that it will try to continue. No choice if I want to either. Once it starts, it then seems to just stop at 0%. There’s no further activity I can detect. Any attempts to start the setup again result in the same, just stopping at 0%

SOLUTION:

So, technically this is partly my bad, however it is a similar problem that might be encountered if someone has an Exchange install fail part-way for whatever reason. In my case it was due to residual objects still being present in Active Directory from a previous Exchange 2010 install. The problem relates to the permissions on those old user objects where the new Exchange server doesn’t have the required permissions due to the old installation “owning” those objects.

1. So, from here the fix was to Uninstall Exchange 2013 (or what little there actually was of it), reboot the server
2. In AD Users and Computers, find and delete *all* those old Exchange mailbox type system accounts (Federatedemail, DiscoverySearchMailbox, HealthMailbox, Migration, SystemMailbox, etc.)
3. Run the Exchange ADPrep again to recreate those accounts. This is instead of the step mentioned in the article to re-create the accounts as the ADPrep will take care of that
4. Start Exchange setup again and it should complete correctly