Installing the mailbox server role for Exchange 2010 never completes and seemingly stuck near the end

Problem

You’re in the process of migrating over from Exchange 2003 to 2010 but while installing a fresh new mailbox server in the environment, you notice that the process takes a very long time and even after waiting for more than an hour, the process bar is still at the same place:

Opening the task manager shoes the store.exe process launches and ends intermittently:

Navigating to the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service in the Services Console show that the store has the status of Starting then stops:

Opening the application logs show the event ID: 5000 is logged with the message:

Unable to initialize the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service. - Error 0x8004010f.

Event ID: 1121 is also logged in the application logs:

Error 0x8004010f connecting to Active Directory.

Opening the system logs show that event ID 7031 is logged:

The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 1 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 5000 milliseconds: Restart the service.

Event ID: 7024 is also logged in the system log:

The Microsoft Exchange Information Store service terminated with service-specific error %%-2147221233.

The logs mentioned above are constantly repeated.

You’ve checked the security permissions for the Configuration container as per the following KB: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb218368(EXCHG.80).aspx

Solution

It took a bit of time for me to find the solution as these error messages led to other problems but after doing a bit of searching, I found someone mentioning that this may be a permissions issue and suggested to run ExBPA again:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/exchange2010/thread/2af749e3-582a-4183-b881-222f39e271d2

I went ahead and ran ExBPA and found the following error: 

Access control list (ACL) inheritance is blocked for the Exchange Organization object (CN=DOMAIN,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=domain,DC=com). This may cause mail flow problems, store mounting issues and other service outages. Follow Microsoft Knowledge Base article 264733 and use the Exchange System Manager to re-enable inheritance on this object.

 

From here on, I went ahead and followed the instructions in the following TechNet article:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998240(EXCHG.80).aspx

Turned on the security tab for ESM:

Notice how inheritance was turned off:

Turned inheritance on:

You will be prompted with what appears to be an error but continue to OK out of the windows:

From here on, reboot your Exchange 2003 servers as the article suggests and you’ll notice that your Information Store for your Exchange 2010 mailbox server no longer crashes and therefore the install of the mailbox server role will now complete.