XADM: Information Store Does Not Start and "Error 0x80004005" Appears in the Event Log After SP3 Upgrade (327480)

SUMMARY

After you apply Exchange 2000 Service Pack 3 ( SP3), the information store service may not restart. In this scenario, the following event may be logged in the application event log:

  Event ID: 5000 
  Source: MSExchangeIS 
  Type: Error 
  Category: General 
  Description: Unable to initialize the Microsoft Exchange 
  Information Store service. Error 0x80004005.

CAUSE

If this issue occurs immediately after you apply Exchange 2000 Server SP3, it may be caused by incorrect permissions in the user context under which the Exchange services are running.

By default in Exchange 2000, the Exchange services run under the LocalSystem security context. This specific security context permits the Exchange services to access the Active Directory and the other local resources required for Exchange 2000 to function correctly.

If the services have been modified to start under a domain user account instead of under the LocalSystem security context, the services do not have all the rights and permissions required to start. In pre-SP3 versions of Exchange Server, the process to grant rights to the specified domain account is fairly straight-forward, and these services do start (although some parts of Exchange Server may not function correctly). However, because of security changes included with Exchange 2000 SP3, the services do not start if the LocalSystem security context is not used.

RESOLUTION

To make sure that the local system account is being used, follow these steps:

In the Computer Management console tree, expand Services and Applications.
Expand Services, and then click the appropriate Exchange 2000 Server services.
For each service, right-click the service, and then click Properties to open the properties of each service.
Click the Log on tab, and then make sure that the local system account is selected.

For additional information about the Exchange Server startup security context, click the following article numbers to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

271920 XADM: Error 1069 Starting an Exchange 2000 Server Service

239762 XADM: Exchange 2000 Services Run Under LocalSystem

for more info on Exchange service startup security context.