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Tuesday 7 June 2011

Small Business Server Migration Limit

When you are migrating to SBS Server 2008 or 2011 and you have 21 days to complete the migration you can sometimes find that this is not enough, working in Managed Services means you can often run out of time due to other issues and it is nice to have as long as you need to make the transition.

You can stop the SBCore Service from shutting down your old SBS 2003 Server after 21 days by making some simple changes to the server in advance.

The shutdown is controlled by the SBCore Service, this is locked down so that you cannot use the MMC to stop the service and if you kill the process it will restart within a minute or so. So you have to use a few tools to make this work, the first is to get Process Explorer from SysInternals.

This is a valuable tool to have anyway and I highly recommend getting a copy here http://bit.ly/fzWyfq

Once you have Process Explorer you can find the process and suspend it, we can now edit the registry and change how the service operates.

Using regedit you can find the key

HKLM\SYSTEM\CURRENTCONTROLSET\SERVICES\SBCORE

Change the permissions on the key so that the Administrators group has Full Access and then you can see the DWORD options for the key.

Find the DWORD Start and change the value to "4". This will place the Service in a disabled state.

Once complete then browse to the SBCore EXE file which is c:\windows\system32\sbscrexe.exe and change the permissions so that Everyone is denied all permissions. This will stop the file from being ran again.

Once complete the server will not restart after 21 days and you have as long as you need to migrate that server.