Since the mailboxes have already been “moved”, I would just follow the manual removal steps in this article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/833396/ for getting rid of the AD object. I would probably check some of the users who were forcibly moved to make sure they only have the new mailbox/server information associated with their accounts.
Jon Galbreath
MCSE/Security+
Systems Administrator
International Studies and Programs
Helpdesk: 517-884-2148
Ph: 517-884-2144
From: Al Puzzuoli [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, December 22, 2010 12:34 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [MSUNAG] Restoring Exchange Server into Org after its Mailboxes have been Forcibly Disabled?
Hi everyone.
This might sound like a weird question but long story short, we had a server crash after a drive failure. Server was running Exchange 2003, but we were already in the process of migrating to Exchange 2010.Since we initially didn’t physically have enough drives to restore the old server, and we were already migrating anyway, I used the 2010 EMC to disable mailboxes still on the 2003 server, and then recreated them in 2010, reimporting user data via PST files. That strategy seems to have worked well enough, but I did of course get warnings upon disabling the boxes because the 2003 Information store was unavailable. Now, we have new drives, and I would like to restore the machine running Exchange server 2003, at least long enough to properly uninstall it and get it out of my AD. So the question is, what will happen if I bring the old exchange server back online? Will it just update to a state in which it no longer controls the mailboxes, or will it do bad things to the users that were forcibly moved?
Thanks,
--Al