In a recent incident, an Exchange server had a complete volume failure during testing. Exchange 2010 was reinstalled but when installing Service Pack 1, it failed upgrading the Mailbox Role. Upon reviewing the log, I found the following line:
Database is mandatory on UserMailbox. Property Name: Database The error doesn’t explain the problem very well but it is basically saying that there is a UserMailbox without a database, which should never happen. The failure of the volume and subsequent reinstall of 2010 left the arbitration mailboxes (and one or two user mailboxes) orphaned. Most of the suggestions to resolve this problem list doing things like deleting the system mailboxes and running “setup.com /PrepareAD”. After looking around, I was able to parse together a few other options and find a fix.
Twice in the past two weeks, I have come across Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 migrations which went uncompleted. In both cases, I received the following error(s) when trying to view the properties of a recipient with spaces in its alias or when viewing the properties of the offline address book:
The properties on have invalid data. If you click OK, default values will be used instead and will be saved if you do not change them before hitting Apply or OK on the property page. If you click cancel, the object will be displayed read-only and corrupted values will be retained. The following values have invalid data: Alias. WARNING: Object has been corrupted and it is in an inconsistent state. The following validation errors have been encountered: WARNING: is not valid for Alias. Set- : is not valid for Alias. Exchange 2003 would allow an administrator to put spaces in the Alias attribute. That poses a problem for 2007 which is strict about the characters it allows in this attribute. In Exchange 2007 the following characters are considered valid: Strings formed with characters from a to z (uppercase or lowercase), digits from 0 to 9, !, #, $, %, &, ‘, *, +, -, /, =, ?, ^, _, `, {, |, } or ~. But, no spaces.