MS Exchange 2003 Down then Up and then Won’t Send Mail

July 18, 2006

Today, I had an intersting problem with Exchange 2003 and I thought I would share it with everyone since there was hardly anything online for this fix.

The Problem:
The information store went down and would not come back up. After checking the event logs, I found the following error: The MAD Monitoring thread was unable to read its configuration from the DS, error ‘0×80040154′. I tried installing SP2 for exchange but it would not update because the SMTP service was unavailable. I checked to see if my SMTP service was available and, I don’t know how this happened, it wasn’t there. I then reinstalled the service and the information store was then able to mount. SP2 was also successfully installed.

Problem #2:
So Exchange is up and running, so I thought. I could access the mailboxes and send email but the email would not be delivered. It literally looked as if it disappeared into thin air. Could not find a solution anywhere and was getting ready to call MS for help.

Solution:
Before I forked out the $245 for the support call, I decided to reinstall exchange and reapply SP2 and I was back up and running. 3 to 4 hours of troubleshooting and I was finally free to go home. So hopefully this will be of some use for someone, no guarentees but it worked for me.

Reference Articles:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;326305
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;867446&spid=1773&sid=global