I was upgrading an hybrid Exchange environment for a customer and started to install the first Exchange 2016 server when i received the below error.
I hadn’t seen this error before but after some research it looked to be an issue with Arbitration Mailboxes being corrupt. So I decided to look at the state of ther Arbitration Mailboxes in Exchange 2010 by running
Get-Mailbox -Arbitration | select name,servername,database
I received the below output.
Strange, this doesn’t appear to show any errors, but neither does it show all the default Arbitration Mailboxes in an Exchange 2010 environment. At this point I remembered Exchange is installed in a subdomain of the AD DS Forest. So i changed the scope by running the below command and re ran the above.
Set-ADServerSettings -ViewEntireForest:$true
Now we can see that two of the Arbitration Mailboxes look to be corrupt and do not reside in a Mailbox Database. When checking on the Exchange Servers in the environment, the server listed here does not even exist!
Now I have been able to identify the Arbitration Mailboxes causing a problem, I can disable them in Exchange and re-enable them. I started with the FederatedEmail.4c1f4d8b-8179-4148-93bf-00a95fa1e042 mailbox.
Disable-Mailbox “FederatedEmail.4c1f4d8b-8179-4148-93bf-00a95fa1e042” -Arbitration
Enable-Mailbox “FederatedEmail.4c1f4d8b-8179-4148-93bf-00a95fa1e042” -Arbitration
Upon initial run of the Enable command I received an error stating that the Active Directory account must be logon-disabled. I located the AD account in the root domain and disabled it. It was successful second time round.
Next I tried the SystemMailbox{1f05a927-03c2-4143-a3e2-c37ec8006a64}. Upon initial try I was unable to disable the mailbox and had to include an extra switch for the command to be successful.
Disable-Mailbox “SystemMailbox{1f05a927-03c2-4143-a3e2-c37ec8006a64}” -Arbitration -DisableLastArbitrationMailboxAllowed
Enable-Mailbox “SystemMailbox{1f05a927-03c2-4143-a3e2-c37ec8006a64} ” -Arbitration
Now if we check the state of the Arbitration Mailboxes once more, we can see they are no longer corrupt.
Once this is OK, i was able to rerun the Exchange Install and it proceeded past the error i was receiving.