Very Strange “Exchange Server Unavailable in SBS Domain”
OK this is weird. I am handing down laptops like trikle down economics it seems like. On this one particular laptop the guy that was getting a new one needed to have his old hard drive for capacity reasons. By chance the hard drive would fit and booted up fine installed drives and went on with it. Well the docking station was causing problems with the printer we were trying to install and I ended up getting some memory dump errors, but taking the docking station out of the equation I got the printer installed and everything.
Now, we are running W2K and Office XP with Outlook 2003, when he goes to launch his email it asks if we want to retry, work offline, or cancel. Which was weird but when it wouldn't connect I started to get concerned. I ended up deleting his profile in outlook and trying to set it back up and that is when I started getting the error message of
"The action could not be completed. The connection to the Microsoft Exchange Server is unavailable. Outlook must be online or connected to complete this action."
The funny thing is, is that I have got drives mapped to the same server that exchange is on, SBS 2003 BTW, and can browse them just fine. I have since uninstalled/reinstalled countless times. Tried using the Outlook XP before upgrading to 2003 and that came back with an error of "An unknown error occurred, error code: 0x9004010f."
Please tell me that somebody has run into this and knows exactly what I am talking about.
Thanks in advance.
Software/Hardware used:
Software/Hardware used:
ASKED:
August 30, 2005 4:17 PM
UPDATED:
August 31, 2005 11:19 AM
Answer Wiki:
Hello mate,
Whilst the boffins are gathering their thoughts try looking for the error message on the internet.
It will probably lead you to look for Article ID 830914 or similar then search for that if that points you to the registry make sure you take note of any changes you do or have a backup made.
Good luck
Dogbreff
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Anything of note in the event logs?
You might have a look at KB817958, I see that referenced in a place or two on a Google search. One person reported success by deleting the Outlook profile and recreating; one way to test this would be to add another user and profile to the machine and see if that user can get connectivity to the Exchange server.
As a last resort you might uninstall/reinstall Office totally, taking care to clean up the registry before you reinstall.
I would like to know if you have tried to build other email profiles on this machine. Try logging in as another user on this machine (yourself, perhaps) and set up an email profile. If it works, then great. While uninstalling and reinstalling the Outlook client may seem logical, the mail settings are usually retained. It may be something as simple as rebuilding your user’s mail profile. That’s where I’d start.
On the downside, it could be a corruption with the user’s Windows profile. I see this as a possibility because if I read your question right, you took the drive from an older machine and popped it in a new machine and made it come to life after a couple of BSOD’s. Creating a dummy profile and exporting the user’s current Windows profile to it, deleting the original profile, then recreating and importing may work. It’s not something to be undertaken by the light of heart, though.
Hope this helps.