Manually Remove Exchange 2007

Manually Remove Exchange 2007

Exchange

Last couple of days I was trying to jumpstart an Exchange 2007 install that got hosed.

At a certain moment I couldn’t install because of an incomplete uninstall. Uninstalling exchange was also unsuccessful because some objects were missing from Active Directory. When I finally got out of that loop, I started getting complaints about MSI’s that could not be found/unpacked. I wanted to avoid reinstalling the OS so I tried removing exchange manually.

1. Run setup /m:uninstall
2. Stop and disable all the Exchange 2007 services
3. Use Registry Editor (Start->Run->Regedit) to remove these Exchange related registry keys:
• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange
• HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchange* (all the keys starting with “MSExchange”)
• HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Microsoft Exchange
4. Remove the entire Web Server role (don’t forget to reinstall afterwards as it’s a prerequisite for E2K7!)
5. Remove the Exchange 2007 server from Active Directory. I ended up deleting the entire “Microsoft Exchange” branch from ADSIEdit (Configuration Container > Services > Microsoft Exchange) as my Org only counts one server.
6. Use Windows Explorer to delete:
• C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server
• C:\ExchangeSetupLogs
7. Use Windows Installer CleanUp Utility to remove all the exchange related info from the installer database.
8. Remove the security groups created by Exchange setup from AD

Note: Manually removing Exchange 2007 is not supported by Microsoft! Official guidance for removing Exchange 2007 can be found in this TechNet article.