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required mailbox move from failed 2003 Exchange to 2010

I have a failed Exchange 2003 server with little hope of bringing back online. I have an Exchange 2010 that I have running but cannot move mailboxes naturally through the 2010EMC due to the 2003 being offline. Beyond deleting and recreating the user account in AD is there a way to either force the exchange attributes to move to the 2010?? The user has mult pop accounts that will download thousands of emails back into (standard pop 14 day retention setting) and being the owner of the company honestly don't want to listen to the crap. No availability to recover from Buffalo backup due to Buffalo becoming corrupted when 2003 failed (backup server also) but wouldn't work due to backup attributes (if was good) is pointed to 2003.

As an FYI, trying something really stupid on an account that the user would at least cut me some slack on, I copied the email to a local pst and then deleted the mailbox in 2010EMC (ok was stupid) hoping would just delete the mailbox and not the user account but was not the case. So when I recreated the account pulled in 1500+ emails due to the 14 day pop settings.

I googled the hell out of this and there is nothing that I can find that says will accomplish the necessary AD property changes with the old server DOA. I need to finish this this w/e so any help would be appreciated.

Simon Butler (Sembee)

Personally I would recover the Exchange 2003 server. If the physical server has failed then that is simply a matter of building a new server (a VM would be fine) with the same name. Reset NOT DELETE the computer account, then join the machine to the domain. Reinstall Exchange 2003 then SP2. That will allow you to clean things up gracefully.
This is basically a dial tone restore to bring up an empty database.

Without restoring the server, you are probably looking at manually updating every AD account with the new mailbox location. Painful. Very painful.

Simon.

bcp_cnsllc

ASKER

I only have 1 mailbox left to move (the owner 7Gb) and the Discovery Mailbox on the 2003. I have no backup to try to recover from due to when O/S failed corrupted the to-disk folder structure so bringing another 2003 back on is pretty much not an option. I just figured that with 2010 there should had been a way to force the attribute changes in AD even if I had to manually adjust the account on the person's Outlook. I am not at all an expert with the Exchange 2010 cmd so any cmd's will need to be explicit.

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Simon Butler (Sembee)

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bcp_cnsllc

ASKER

How will bringing up a new instance w/o a database to reload back to get a mailbox moved?? Doesn't that get me at max a new exchange server with a database with nothing in it??

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bcp_cnsllc

ASKER

I didn't want to spend the money but really didn't have much choice. It really sucked because I didn't know Microsoft raised their charges so I quoted the $250 which has been for years so ran into an issue right their. To me their should have been able to find the way to either force the mailbox move via the Exchange CMD or the documentation to manually remove Exchange from AD. Gave it a B because it worked and the project is done BUT really was a C because shouldn't have had to spend the money.