Windows 2003 cluster: One node offline causes the cluster service on the other node to fail

I configured a 2 node cluster on 2 Windows 2003 machines with Exchange 2003

The resources:

• Majority node set
• Data volume
• Cluster IP
• Cluster network name
• Exchange 2003 system attendant (and all it's dependent resources)

When both are online, I can successfully failover from one node to the other by stoping the cluster service on one of the nodes, and Exchange 2003 works properly.

I tried disabling the network interfaces on one server to see if it propperly failovers in more realistic scenario and something weird occured - The cluster service on the other node has stopped and the whole cluster is unavailable.

The service is trying to restart but fails. The event log shows:

Event ID 1009:

Cluster service could not join an existing server cluster and could not form a new server cluster. Cluster service has terminated.

I'f it failovers only if you manually disable the service in one node, thet defeats the whole purpose of having the cluster in the first place.

Please advice.