Article ID: 289671
Article Last Modified on 10/25/2007
APPLIES TO
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition
- Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
- Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server Standard Edition
This article was previously published under Q289671
SYMPTOMS
When you try to run Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server or Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Setup with the setup /forestprep command to join an existing Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5 site, you may receive the following error message:
You may also see the following error in the Exchange Server Setup Progress.log:
CAUSE
This issue may occur if either the organization display name or any of the site display names in your exchange organization contain invalid characters.
NOTE See the "More Information" section in this article for a list of valid characters.
Multiple values or any change to the values in the "Description" attribute of Exchange 5.5 Schema-Attribute objects such as "Extension-Attribute-1" (common name) or "Custom Attribute 1" (Admin-Display-Name) may also lead to this error, but it has nothing to do with invalid characters in the Site or Organization name.
If you change the description to match the "Directory Name" or remove the extra values, forestprep can complete. It is possible that a customer has a third-party program that uses the additional information in these attributes, so before you remove or change the "Description" data, verify that you do not need these attributes.
You can use Raw Admin.exe to remove extra values from the Description attribute. See the Schema.csv file on the Exchange 5.5 setup CD for the correct values. For example, "Custom Attribute 1" should have "Extenstion-Attribute-1" in the Description.
RESOLUTION
To resolve this issue, in the Exchange Server 5.5 Exchange Server Administrator program, remove the characters that are not valid from the display name, and then run the setup /forestprep command again.
MORE INFORMATION
Valid characters for organization and site names in Exchange include:
- A through Z
- a through z
- 0 through 9
- Space
- Hyphen/dash
Additional query words: sbs letters org supported unsupported installing XADM
Keywords: kberrmsg kbprb KB289671