Exchange Servare nightmare - Hepl me I've fallen and I can't get up!!! 1

[neomodo]

So a client of mine was running exchange 2000 on a windows 2000 server that bit the dust and wasn't backed up. I went in and installed a Win 2003 server on a new machine w/ exchange 2003 on it... The dead machine was the only DC on their small network so I made the 2003 server a dc - the only one - I know I'm breaking recommended deployment practices but that's how they want it that's what they can afford.

In essence I was instructed to create a new domain with the same exact name as the old domain - Did that - rejoined all workstations to the new domain everything is is fine there. However the part I'm writing about is what I was asked to do next. Basically the guy wants me to try and recover the old exchange data as much as possible.

I was able to get the old system running and the entire exchange folders are all there in one piece. There's no chance of recovering the Server OS from before. So my question is how the heck might I be able to attempt recovery of the old Exchange server perhaps using the new 2003 Server. All I have done so far is basically copy the contents of MDBDATA to a folder in the new system assuming that it will want to have the data locally accessible.

As you can imagine it's a bit of a doozy - years ago I recovered an Exchange 2000 server that had lost it's DC/ Active directory parents but I don't remember what I did and I didn't have the added obstacle of having to deal with things in a new domain where everything is named the same (except for the actual server name in this case.

HELP!!!

 

[Zelandakh]

Choices: use recovery storage group to recover the data or Aelita Recovery Manager. Both should recover adequately.

 

[neomodo]

I have looked at the Recovery Storage group thing but it only sees the current store - am I mising something? I remember running into this thing the other day that asked me the location of my log files but when it didn't like the mapped network drive to the other machine I trsfrd swtuff locally- Now I can't find the tool I am referring to...

 

[neomodo]

...Fortunately I'm not the one responsible for the screw up - by the time they called me they had a corrupted hard drive that wouldn't let itself be backed up or fixed or nothing - I'm there to try and rescue them - I did install they new dc and exchange 2003 on a new machine and some of the problem could have been avoided if I hadn't agreed to create a new domain with the same name etc...

 

[Zelandakh]

Will they give you the budget for Aelita? That will do the job.

 

[stupman]

Exchange Disaster recovery:

Use same OS, same SP, same version Exchange and same SP of Exchange.
Then make all names like before: domain, exch organisation and Admin groups, storage groups ...
Then your store will mount.
Then after that, you can use a utility called mbconn.exe, that will create userids for the mailboxes and link the mailboxes to those ids.
There is an Exchange 2000 disaster recovery white paper available with Microsoft. Very well written, and a bible when it comes to restoring Exch2/Exch2k3.