Hi all, I'm in the process of building a new Exchange 2007 server for my organisation but am having trouble with the initial installation. The history of this goes back about 18 months ago when I installed Exchange 2007 (successfully) but then a management decision forced me to uninstall it and we stuck with 2003. I must have made a big error when I uninstalled it though, which was to delete the Exchange 2007 default Administrative Group. Now the install fails on the client access role with:"Error message when you try to reinstall Exchange 2007: "Could not find the default Administrative Group 'Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)""So I tried to rerun all the domain prep switches. The legacyexchangepermissions was fine and so was the schema one but the /prepareAD fails with the following message:Active Directory operation failed on DC.DOMAIN.org.uk. The object 'CN Rooms,CN=All Address Lists,CN=Address Lists Container,CN=DO MAIN,CN=Microsof change,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=DOMAIN,DC=COM' already exists.I have had a look at the All Rooms object in adsiedit but, quite frankly, I'm not at all sure what I should do with it. Rename it / delete it all seems pretty scary. Besides I deleted it on my test domain and the /prepareAD failed with another error message anyway.If anyone could shed some light on this I would be very grateful!!Many thanks, Brianbrian_c

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937358Error message when you try to reinstall Exchange 2007: "Could not find the default Administrative Group 'Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT)'"

Thanks very much for the reply.I should have mentioned that I'd already looked at that technote and followed its advice. After I delete the 'watermark' I run prepareAD again and it still fails with exactly the same message as I put in my original post. The Exchange installation also cannot complete because the Administrative group is still absent.No mention of any of these problems is made in the BPA 2007 readiness check.Does anyone think there is anything I can do to get the prepareAD to run correctly?Regards,brian_c

Check in regedit and check under each role key to see if there is a watermark and/or a key called "Action"

Thanks again for taking time to respond Andy. I have purged every "watermark" and "action" under each of the role keys but alas still no luck running the prepareAD command - same error message.brian_c

Ok, lets step back, a bit.The 'CN Rooms,CN=All Address Lists,CN=Address Lists Container,CN=DO MAIN,CN=Microsof change,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=DOMAIN,DC=COM' already exists." error. It should be "ALL Rooms" if it was created with 2007. What is the default recipient filter?It should be: (Alias -ne $null -and (RecipientDisplayType -eq 'ConferenceRoomMailbox' -or RecipientDisplayType -eq 'SyncedConferenceRoomMailbox'))You can delete that if required. You can always recreate.Note this if you delete it:http://blogs.msdn.com/dgoldman/archive/2007/12/05/deleting-the-all-rooms-address-list-stops-it-from-showing-up-in-owa.aspx

Hi, I actually posted a reply a few hours ago at work but it appears it never made it, so a shorter version: Thank you AndyD! I deleted the "All Rooms" dist list, and a few minutes later it was recreated. I then copied its DN to the msExchResourceAddressLists attribute in the organisation object (as D Goldman suggests). The recipient filter for the All Rooms dist list returned to normal and the prepareAD command worked and the install worked. happy xmas everybody brian_c

Glad you got it working. Happy Holidays!