Exchange 2007 / 2010 Install and Uninstall Problem Troubleshooting
In my test lab environment, I recently attempt to upgrade from Exchange 2007 SP2 to Exchange 2010. Mostly, it went just fine, but then I started making some changes along the way and things went terribly wrong… I started getting the following error when installing/removing components:
Setup previously failed while performing the action "install". You cannot resume setup by performing the action "BuildtoBuildUpgrade"
Setup previously failed while performing the action "uninstall". You cannot resume setup by performing the action "BuildtoBuildUpgrade"
The trick to solving these errors is simple, but finding the solution took me several days of research, since Google and Bing searches produced only a handful of results with people having the same problem but none having the answer.
One forum mentioned something about the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Exchange registry location and looking for a “Watermark” DWORD value. Well, turns out, this is partially right, but there’s more to it than that. For each role installed, there are 3-4 values… “Action”, “ConfiguredVersion”, “UnpackedVersion”, and “Watermark”.
Now ordinarily, Action and Watermark shouldn’t show up from what I can tell. If they do, that’s the problem. The errors above are generated when a previous attempt to install/uninstall/upgrade failed and left those two values behind.
Deleting the two values ensures that you’re able to proceed again with the setup process. But here’s where we run into another snag… because the previous process didn’t work, you’re going to be left with some files and data lingering that probably ought not be. Because of this, I would personally recommend that you INSTALL any affected roles from scratch, reboot, and then uninstall them (if that was your desired course of action).
Of course, if you’re trying to install/re-install, I would recommend uninstall Exchange in its entirety first and then re-installing. Annoying? Yeah. Definitely. I hope that Exchange Server 2014 (or whatever year is next) will have the Exchange team focusing on the setup process a bit, because in my opinion the readiness checks are nice, but need a lot of improvement too.