Wednesday, July 8, 2015

uninstall SBS 2008 from domain

My broadstroke steps to uninstall SBS 2008 from my domain.


  1. delete all offline address books in EMC
  2. delete all public folders with these two PowerShell commands: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb201664(v=exchg.140).aspx
  3. Disable and then purge all user mailboxes (you do not delete mailboxes as this also deletes the active directory accounts as well)
    a. You do not delete mailboxes, but rather you go to recipient configuration -> mailbox in EMC and highlight all mailboxes and choose "disable"
    b. You'll see all the mailboxes go to the disconnected mailboxes section
    c. Now, you run these two commands to purge the mailboxes in an elevated Exchange Shell:
    d. $users = Get-MailboxStatistics | where-object { $_.DisconnectDate -ne $null } | Select DisplayName,MailboxGuid
    e. $users | ForEach { Remove-Mailbox -Database "Mailbox Database" -StoreMailboxIdentity $_.MailboxGuid -confirm:$false }
    f. Credit for those two commands goes here: http://www.geekyprojects.com/microsoft-server-tutorials/how-to-purge-or-delete-a-disconnected-mailbox-in-exchange-2007/
  4. Uninstall Exchange (required following several KBs with steps on deleting things like OAB, user mailboxes, public folders, send connectors, etc)
  5. Transfer the 5 FSMO roles to a new domain controller with the global catalog role via these steps
  6. Remove Active Directory Certificate Services
  7. Demote the SBS server
  8. Remove the SBS server from the domain (put in a workgroup)
  9. Disable and/or remove WSUS from group policy via these steps
IMPORTANT NOTE - When I did a dcpromo to demote my SBS 2008, it somehow broke my DFS namespace even though the SBS 2008 server was *not* the host of this namespace.  I ended up having to create a new namespace after I had demoted the SBS server.  This is definitely something to check on future SBS uninstallations.

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