SharePoint 2010 User Profile Sync Error Fixed

Last night, I decided to play on a real server installation of SharePoint 2010 rather than the Win7 image I’ve been using for the past several months.  I had a Hyper-V image I had installed and configured, but had to reinstall a Server 2008 image with the Hyper-V role to load it up.  Of course, after loading my Hyper-V image, it had to be activated.  I did this, but the net effect was that one of the Forefront services was stopped and I was receiving a MOSS MA error when trying to configure my existing AD sync job on the server.

After some reading on the social forums, I saw some horrifying posts about manually starting the Forefront service.  I know you should never do this but luckily there were also comments stating the correct way to restart the service.  You do this from SharePoint Central Admin by managing services on the server.  In my case, the User Profile Synchronization Service was reported as Started.  So, I stopped the service and then restarted the service by resupplying the service credentials.  After several minutes, both Forefront services had restarted and User Profile Sync service showed that it had started again. 

Now, I needed to update my AD connection configuration.  I attempted to make my modification and received another error related to a login failure.  I was not sure why I received this error but wondered if it related back to my activation of windows since AD also was running on the machine hosting SP2010.  So, I deleted my AD connection and recreated it.  Now, I was able to modify the containers to populate and did not receive any errors.  Finally, I started the sync and viola – user accounts sync’d into my environment. 

So, my lesson learned is that if you have to reactivate Windows Server 2008 R2, the user profile service will need to be updated.

1. Stop and Start the User Profile Sync Service in Central Admin
2. Recreate the AD connection and configuration (delete the old configuration)
3. Restart the profile import

I did not have any custom properties or additional mapped properties, but I’d imagine you may need to recreate these mappings depending on AD customizations in other environments.  So, be careful if you need to move around Hyper-V images that aren’t properly prepped.

For more information on prepping images see this article on sysprep (compatibility) and this one (usage) .  Note that if you are runing AD on your SP2010 box as I was, sysprep is not an option.