ExMerge not showing users mailbox since the user was removed from AD

[zypadman]

I restored an older mailbox store to my Recovery Storage Group. I mounted the recovered database and ran Exmerge hoping to recover a single users mailbox to a PST file.

This user has been removed from Active Directory. When I run Exmerge against the Recovery Storage Group I get the following error: "An error was encountered with one or more users when retrieving the list of mailboxes homed in the selected databases on server"

I realize the problem being that the user is no longer found in the msExchMailboxGuid. As a work around I was going to create another storage group and mailbox store, but this is not supported with Exchange 2003 standard.

Is there any other way to recover this single mailbox to a PST file?

Thanks in advance!

 

[zypadman]

Ok I finally found a solution to this issue and it worked great!

The problem is, the Mailbox GUID associated to the mailbox you are trying to recover is not the same as the user you recreated in AD. (even though the userid is the same)

Here is a way to get around this:

Exmerge will throw an error something like: Cannot identify the user with MSExchMailboxGuid of {foo}, LegacyExchangeDn is: {name of your deleted user}

First:

Copy the MSExchMailboxGUID that ExMerge displays and paste it into notepad.

\FE\DF\1D\80\CC\1D\8CJ\AA\7E\F1\E9\DDk\A9\2F

Now, remove all of the backslashes:

FE DF 1D 80 CC 1D 8CJ AA 7E F1 E9 DDk A9 2F

Now, notice above how some of the character groupings above are groups of three, instead of two. We must separate the rightmost bit from the other two:

FE DF 1D 80 CC 1D 8C J AA 7E F1 E9 DD k A9 2F

Now, for the single characters above that we separated off, we need to replace that ASC II character with it's hex value. Note that the hex values for upper case characters is different than the lower case value:

FE DF 1D 80 CC 1D 8C 4A AA 7E F1 E9 DD 6B A9 2F

Now, open ADSIEdit/Domain (ADSIEdit can be found in support tools) and locate cn=username where username is the name for the user who's mailbox you are trying to restore. Locate the MSExchMailboxGUID attribute, and paste your reformatted GUID (example above) into this field.

Restart Exmerge on your exchange server, and re-run the Exmerge. You should now be able export the mailbox because the MSExchMailboxGUID of the exported mailbox from backup now matches MSExchMailboxGUID of your "new" user.

Great work around!


By the way...XMSRE, thanks for the worthless reply.