Microsoft Exchange Information Store service terminated with service-specific error %%-2147221213

On February 8, 2013 I lost a hard drive on the array that has a VM that runs this web site. But that isn’t what this article is about. The controller brought the standby drive online but the alarm wouldn’t turn off and the array continued to be sluggish, even after the rebuild was done. I had to replace the drive and run a manual rebuild to stabilize the VM’s on the host.

After I brought the host and the VM’s back up, the inside Exchange server wouldn’t mount the information store and always made these errors.

• System Log: “Microsoft Exchange Information Store service terminated with service-specific error %%-2147221213″.
• Exchange Manager: MapiExceptionNetworkError: Unable to make admin interface connection to server.
• Application Log: Unable to initialize the Information Store service because  the clocks on the client and server are skewed.   This may be caused by a time change either in the client or the server,  and may require a reboot of that computer.   Verify that your domain is properly configured and  is currently online.

The time was in fact off between the Exchange server and the domain controllers so I set the time within two seconds of each other and rebooted the Exchange server. Still, it would not mount the information store. The time difference was the cause of the problem but machines weren’t synching up properly. I then ran gpupdate /force from the console of the domain controller that was offline for almost 24 hours and then did the same on the Exchange server. After that the information store would mount.

Originally posted by: Cory L Curtis – 2013-02-17