Exchange Server 2007 Setup on Server 2003 Cluster Node Fails Intermittently

Source: Microsoft Support

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The Cluster Mailbox Server Prerequisites test may fail when installing Exchange Server 2007 on a Windows Server 2003 cluster node.  During the Exchange Server 2007 setup process, a check will be performed on the volume selected for hosting the mailbox, to ensure that the volume is a clustered resource.  This is accomplished by sending IOCTL_VOLUME_IS_CLUSTERED.  In the failure case, the IOCTL will fail to recognize the volume as a clustered resource.  A error similar to the following will be logged in the Exchange setup log:

[ERROR] The storage path 'R:\Mailbox' for a single copy cluster must be a clustered disk. Please specify a different path for the shared storage.

This issue is caused by a race condition in the cluster disk driver, where it will fail to attach to the volume stack intermittently.

In testing, it has been found that you may be able to work around the issue by restarting, removing MPIO (if installed), or by shutting down all but one cluster node.

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