Failed to Create Availability Group, SQL Server error 41042 encountered

Wow, it's been close to six months since my last post!!! Where has the time gone?

Anyway, I ran into an issue that no amount of Google-fu seemed to help me with. The issue was "Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 41042". I ran into this problem trying to create an Availability Group using the name of an AG that had been previously deleted, but appears to have not been completely removed. Here's a screengrab for the error:

As stated, this was an AG name for an AG that had existed and was gone from SQL Server.... but hadn't disappeared from the "Failover Cluster Manager." So I deleted the AG's service manually from the Failover Cluster manager.  

This appeared to do the trick, but then I got the error. So what to do????? As I mentioned, I checked google profusely to no avail. And after thinking for a bit, decided that this had to be a registry issue. I did some googling to determine where SQL Server Availability Group Registry keys live, and found the following excerpt from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff929171.aspx:

In the registry I navigated to HKLM\Cluster\HADRAgNameToIDMap, and found the AG name I was trying to use. I deleted the key, and reran the AG wizard and.... still no luck. So I decided to do this on every node that had been a part of the AG and... Voila!!!! IT WORKED!!!


Now remember, use this at your own risk.