rebuild exchange server

Do you have an old Exchange server in place and this one will take it's place, or did you drop the old one and rebuild it into this new one????  If the old server is still in place, the easiest thing to do is to join the new one to the existing Exhchange organization, move your mailboxes through AD and everything else like public folders and then drop your old machine.

If this is the only exchange box and you dropped it, reformatted and rebuilt it and now want to bring it back up.  If you do not have a backup of your information store then you would have nothing to restore.  In other words, if this is your only Exhcange box and the old IS does not exist as there was not a backup, unfortunately I think you are out of luck.  How can you resotore what you don't have.

When i rebuilt the exchange server, i rebuilt it on a new hard drive.  The old hard drive is still operating at the moment.  In other words, the old exchange server is still in place and i need to replace it with the newly built hard drive.

As I said earlier, the easiest thing to do is to join the new one to the existing Exhchange organization, move your mailboxes through AD and everything else like public folders and then drop your old machine.  So, the best way to do this is to join the domain with the new machine first.  Run setup /forestprep and /domainprep first from the Exchange CD.  If you bring up Setup, it will walk you through adding an additional exchange server to an existing organization.  Follow the prompts and this machine will then be integrated.  You can then follow the examples on copying over your public folders and system files.  Once done, move all your mailboxes to the new box.  When your users logon the first time, they will get automatic redirections to the new store on the new server.  Leave that up for a few days to make sure everything switches.  Be sure to point your MX records or Firewall redirects to the IP address of the new server.  

When happy with the new box, go into the Exchange Operations manager and make the new server master and remove the old server from the organization.

i guess i'm not explaining this correctly.  I only have one machine.  I will not have them both online at the same time.  I have to replace the hard drive on the old machine with the new hard drive, thus the old machine will not be online to move the boxes.

You will definately have a problem there.  Was the old Exchange 2003 to or 2000???

2003