Over the last couple of days I have been setting up Exchange 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008 RTM. No matter what I tried, I was stuck in a Catch-22: If I logged in as Local Admin on the box, I didn't have permission to make the necessary changes to the domain; if I logged in as Domain Admin, I didn't have permission to write to the local log file on the C:\ drive of the Exchange server. I kept getting errors like the one at right from the GUI, or this one from the command line:
Failed to initialize the log file: Access to the path 'C:ExchangeSetupLogs\ExchangeSetup.log' is denied.
Setup will not continue.
Those are NOT the most descriptive errors. If I logged in as local admin, those errors went away, but instead I received errors that the local admin account didn't have the rights to make massive changes to the domain (shocker).
I posted on the Microsoft Technet Exchange forums, and hardly anyone read my post, much less answered it. One person responded that they had the same problem, so I knew it wasn't just me. I noticed that I couldn't run the basic commands that install Windows 2008 components, like PowerShell without getting similar errors. It didn't matter if it was on a Hyper-V VM, or a physical server, I could not resolve the problem.
Then I had an idea. I knew that Windows 2008 and Vista are the same underneath, and I remember that the first thing I did when I installed Vista was to disable UAC. . . hmm. . . yep, that was the problem. Here is where you do it on Windows 2008, just like in Vista:
Then go here:
I hope that anyone else that is about to go crazy from Installing Exchange 2007 on Exchange 2008 finds this blog entry and simply disables UAC.
21 comments:
Josh,
thought i would post and say "THANK YOU!" you saved me a lot of frustration.
See people are always lurking out there reading blogs!
Josh,
thought i would post and say "THANK YOU!" you saved me a lot of frustration.
See people are always lurking out there reading blogs!
Guy,
I am very glad that it helped you! As you can tell from my post, it was a frustrating excercise for me. I was very relieved when it turned out that I could fix it by flipping a checkbox. Good luck!
-Josh
Josh,
As guy said, "Thank You". Had the same problem, typed in the error message and your blog was first up on google.
Thanks
Thank you. You are my hero. I was about to put out a hit on Bill Gates for this crap when i found your post.
Indeed, Many thanks! Was able to quickly resolve by googling the problem, and reading your post.
hey a good one -
Visit for Tech News on http://sysadmin-stuff.blogspot.com
http://windowsadminguru.blogspot.com
Cheers...
I right-clicked on the setup.exe and clicked on Run As Administrator, i then googled and came up with this blog to make sure i wasn't crazy! Thanks!
I was about ready to drop kick an Exchange vm right right through the uprights when I found your post . Thanks
Another thank-you from another grateful co-sufferer.
Thanks for this.
You've saved me a lot of time.
Regards
Simon UK
Yeah thanx a lot to you and to google :)
Yes thank you very much for this. It saved me quite a bit of frustration.
FWIW I found the Run As Administrator option solved this problem quite nicely.
As many have said before, THANK YOU. Excellent tip that NO other documentation seems to provide. UAC is so useless!
Thanks, very usefull, thought I was going mad for a while :-)
Richard 75
And in typical Msft fashion, it required a restart of my SBS 2008 after unchecking UAC. Msft is so brilliant most of the time, but then they do crap like this :(
I was cussing at my brand new SBS 2008 installation wondering how the heck my migration account user would not have rights to install something into a folder on the server.
I read your comment about 2008 being like Windows 7. I right click the installer and choose "Run as Administrator" and it ran perfectly.
Thanks!
Several weeks ago I had the journey, where I accidentally learnt about one thing. To tell the truth it isn't usual thing, because of then I had problem with my MS Exchange. Consequently I knew about one tool, which might be effective in this problem just like my that time problem - edb recover.
I want to thank you for taking the time to post this fix. You have saved me hours of aggravation although I'm sure their are more hours to come. i don't remember SBS2003 being as time consuming as SBS2008.
- Nick
You saved my bacon!! u rock!!
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