For weeks my lab Exchange 2003 cluster was down. The cluster was configured in a active passive configuration and only one server has been up for months; the second virtual guest node was shutdown. At some point I was not able to reach the Exchange 2003 mailboxes and I start to review the Eventviewer and Services on the active online node. System log contained around 100 4275 event id errors in the IIS Config catalog category. I manually tried to start IIS Admin service and even reboot the server but still without success to get the service up and running. Metadatabase was not changed in anyway.

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Error parsing XML file. Reason: An invalid character was found in the content. Incorrect XML.

I went to C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv and renanmed Metabase.xml file to Metabase.xml1. This is the file IIS uses for its configuration database.

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I reviewed to eventlog to find out when this Eventid 4275 started. The first error was on 12 December.

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The C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv\History folder contains all previous XML Metadatabase history files.

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I copied the one just before the error event and paste the file to C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv. Rename the file to MetaDatabase.xml

Go back to Services MMC console and start IIS Admin and WWW service. Both started successfully. Start Cluster Administrator and bring to Exchange group online.

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After weeks the Exchange 2003 cluster started to function successfully. Second note was updated and virtual machines were backuped.

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Why did this happened? The only reason I was able to find is during the first day of the errors, there were couple of power outages and the IIS Metadatabase.xml file did became corrupt.