I have gotten myself into something here. I picked up a consulting gig for a non-profit org that was really in trouble.
Some background: they had SBS 2000 with Exchange. The server crashed one day (they have no IT) so they called in a local PC company (like Geeks on Call). Their tech brought Windows back but the AD was hosed and Exchange didn’t recover. After a 10 minute conversation with tech I don’t have any idea what he was doing. He mentioned setting up a workgroup for the client (eek) because he couldn’t recover the domain. I (naively) thought it couldn’t be unrecoverable and took on the job. Well, the AD was in such bad shape that I couldn’t even reset user passwords. I attempted to seize FSMO roles on the “recovered” server but failed. The client bought a new server (SBS 2003)and I installed a new domain, things are stable.
The trouble I’m having now is getting the Exchange data. They have outsourced to GMail and are happy with that but want the old emails back. An attempt to reinstall EXC2000 on the old server has met with some problems due to the bad AD. Can I mount the old DB to the EXC2003 installation? Is there another method for extracting messages from the old DB?
Thanks for your suggestions.
