Exchange 2010 Setup fails when trying to install additional Exchange role

Hi there…

My name is Christian Lechner. I'm a consultant at a german IT service provider Cellent AG http://www.cellent.de.

The main part of my work is messaging with Microsoft Exchange and identity management with Microsoft ILM 2007 or FIM 2010 along with the necessary IT infrastructure products around (Active Directory, DNS, DHCP and so on…).

My fist post is about a problem I had with a customer of mine when trying to install an additional Exchange role on an existing Exchange 2010 server. I started with installing a clean Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Server with all Windows Updates available. After that I installed an Exchange 2010 Server (without any Service Pack) with the roles Mailbox, Hub Transport and Client Access. Everything was working well and the server is serving the clients and users as expected. At the end of August with the RTM of Exchange 2010 SP1 we updated our server with an installation source downloaded directly from the Microsoft Website http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=50B32685-4356-49CC-8B37-D9C9D4EA3F5B&displaylang=en without any problems.

A few weeks later, the customer decided to try Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging. No Problem, I thought. I took the downloaded SP1 installation source (extracted to C:\Users\Administrator\Downloads) from Microsoft and started the setup. I ended up with a very strange error.

The Exchange 2010 DVD (without SP1) was still in the DVD-drive of the server.

I couldn't get rid of this error until I started the setup from a SP1 DVD. The Exchange 2010 SP1 setup is always looking for the same source drive and folder where the original installation came from.

You can find a video from my installation on youtube. Don't worry. It's from my lab and not from the customers installation. :-)

Happy weekend

Chris