This is the revised version of my initial blog last night:
I always perform updates monthly on all of my servers beginning at 10:30pm Eastern Time of the Wednesday following the 2nd Tuesday of the month (to stay in line with Microsoft Updates). I know a lot of Windows admins look at the 2nd Tuesday of each month as “Black Tuesday”, and I now have a first hand incident that has me dreading it also.
So last night, Windows Updates recommended I install Exchange 2010 Server Update Rollup 4. I have never had issues in the past, so I quickly looked into known issues and guidance. Nothing was listed with a Bing / Google search (I use Bing more when I’m dealing with Microsoft technologies). Anyways, last night the updates took about an hour to install. Once done, I rebooted as normal, but Outlook Web Access didn’t ever come back. After some investigation, all of the exchange related services that make exchange work were disabled. I’m not sure why this was, but I began troubleshooting lots of stuff and the I have 2 theories for what happened (I did both at the same time so it could be either one).
I first tried to remove the update rollup that Windows Update installed but was asked for a DVD that I don’t think was ever made and released by Microsoft!!!! I also tried a system restore which lead nowhere since it doesn’t exist on Server 2008. After this, I was considering my options, I tried 2 things at the same time which worked to fix the issue and get Update Rollup 4 installed (thankfully).
Theory 1: The updater package disabled the web service and since the web service had to be up to be updated, the updater failed to update everything successfully.
Theory 2: The previous update rollups (I had update rollups 1, 2, and 3 all installed) were interfering with the new update rollup. So I removed all 3 previous ones then reinstalled update rollup 4. Note that I had to uninstall all 3 of these with the broken install of rollup 4 still listed in the optional remove panel. Once I was ready to reinstall update rollup 4, only update 4 was listed in the installed updates for exchange section of Windows Updates.
Steps to fix such an error:
1. don’t panic or get impatient, this will take about 3 hours
First remove any previous update rollups from the add/remove programs in the control panel for applied updates. Each one will take about 15 to 30 minutes to uninstall. I started with rollup 3 and worked my way backwards.
2. get the official rollup 4 package from Microsoft’s website
3. open up an elevated (run as administrator) command prompt and change directory to the file that you downloaded
4. execute the rollup msp file – don’t do anything once the installer loads yet
5. open up the services console (under administrative tools)
6. start the updater… as soon as it is done with the stopping services text, immediately goto the services console and enable both the iis admin service and world wide web publishing service, also START them immediately. There is about a 60 second window to do both (start the www publish service first)
7. let it install, afterwards you will need to re-enable all of the exchange related services that were running prior to the original windows update (I hope you have a good memory, for my server, it was all but the edgesync service)
8. reboot the server
9. hopefully exchange will work again, for me it did. Apparently Microsoft released a bad update to Windows Update this past black Tuesday and it caught me off guard 
Anyways, I hope this information is useful for other Windows Admins that are in this situation without any option but restore a complete system image and have lots of downtime while Exchange’s latest email is restored.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 14th, 2010 at 2:22 am and is filed under Hosting / Server Administration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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Another fantastic post, often cool to go through a superb post on a subject you truly care about.
you saved my bacon, accidentally pushed this through wsus and locked a machine up. this took me 15 min or so to do (fresh install, no previous URs) this and all is well.
thanks.
have already been visiting ur website for 3 days. really like what you posted. btw i will be doing study about this issue. do you happen to know any sites or perhaps online forums that I can get more information? thanks in advance.
I have to thank you for your clear and detailed instructions on how to fix this issue. I also made the mistake of assuming MS updates were flawless and installed them and ended up horking my Exchange Server.
These steps took me about an hour and a half and fixed the problem.
As a note for those of you who run into problems with the Information Store not stopping and causing problems with your uninstall / install – if you have backup exec you’ll want to stop the beremote services before preforming the uninstall / install steps.
Thanks again!
Outstanding news it is actually. We have been searching for this tips.
I was installing a clean server 2008 r2 and Exchange 2010. After running the windows update everything stopped. I will give this procedure a try and let you know.
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