Thursday, May 10, 2012

Exchange 2007 Uninstall hangs on Remove Exchange Files

Today I was decomissioning an Exchange 2007 server for a customer.  The uninstall process got down to "Remove Exchange Files" where it just hanged and did not proceed.  The environment was running Exchange 2007 SP2 on Windows Server 2008 Standard SP2.

After a quick search I found that I ran into a known uninstall issue. The hanging in removing the Exchange files is caused by a final Powershell script that won't run so instead of ending in failure it just hangs and gives the appearance that it is still processing the removal.

All you need to do is open task manager and kill powershell.exe.  Doing this will automatically spawn a new Powershell and allow the removal to complete.  In my situation, the removal completed within 10 seconds of the new Powershell launching.

13 comments:

  1. Intersting and beautiful blog lovely presentation thanks for sharing your views..
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  2. This is great contribution on this awesome screen subject. I must say thanks for the giving time to discuss and present it here for us.
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  3. Thanks a million, this tip was exactly what i needed

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  4. Thank you! it worked!

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  5. Thanks! Worked like a charm.

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  6. Thanks Clint, this worked perfectly! I sat and waited for over an hour before I finally realized that it was taking way longer than it should :$

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  7. Perfect, handy tip, worked a treat.

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  8. Hello Clint, have you ran into this issue during the upgrade process from sp2 to sp3?

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  9. No I havent had this issue during an SP2 to SP3 upgrade

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  10. Thanks! I had been waiting for 3 hours and 57 minutes before I ran across your tip. But it did not finish in 10 seconds, took more like 1 minute :)

    ReplyDelete