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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.