ADSIEdit Cleanup After Exchange 2003 Crash During Transition To Exchange 2010

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I would value some input from a few Exchange 2010 experts. I have almost completed the transition from Exchange 2003 Standard to Exchange 2010 Standard. Everything went smoothly until I tried to uninstall Exchange 2003. At that point the server bit the dust and died completely. I now have NO access to the old Exchange System Management MMC as I am running Windows 2008 SR2 and Windows 7 only. I can only fix this with ADSIEdit, EMShell, and EMConsole.

I have used the 2010 shell to move/remove/verify that all mailboxes, public folders and OAB are hosted on Exchange 2010. I also verified that the routing connector has been deleted. The only two things that were not done was to remove the Recipient Update Service and actually perform the removal of the 2003 software.

I have spent a lot of time going through ASDIedit and have located the old Administrative Group and the Exchange 2003 server listed under it. I also located the Recipient Update Service which includes two entries; Enterprise and my domain name. I have read that it is an unwise idea to remove the old administrative group so I won't bother messing with that.

I am repeatedly getting three warnings in the Application Log. Both are from MSExchangeTransport EventID 5006 (Cannot find route to Mailbox Server OLDSERVER) and 5020 (The topology doesn't contain a route to Exchange 2000 Server or Exchange Server 2003)

So my questions are:

To clean out AD of the old Exchange 2003 info, can I delete the server name folder (Configuration -> Services -> Microsoft Exchange -> ExchOrg -> Administrative Groups -> First Administrative Group -> Servers -> Old Server) and also delete the Update Recipient Service (Enterprise) and Update Recipient Service (DOMAIN) containers safely?

Are there any additional items I need to address to ensure the AD is clean?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Best Answer

I'd spin up an instance of an older version of Windows, install the Exchange 2003 management tools, and continue with the decommissioning procedure just to be safe. I'm assuming this is a production environment, and I don't think I'd toy around with deleting records via ADSIEdit.

Related Solutions

Need to Remove Exchange 2003 Server That Crashed During Transition to 2010

Remove the exchange server from the First Administrative Group first.

First if you haven't already promote the new exchange server as the master: go to Exchange System Manager > Administrative Groups > First Administrative Group > Routing Groups > First Routing Group > Members Right click your new server and click "set as master"

To remove the old exchange server go to Exchange System Manager > Administrative Groups > First Administrative Group > Servers. Right click the old server go to All Tasks > Remove server

if you get an error like this

    The Server "SERVERNAME" cannot be removed because:
-One or more users currently use a mailbox on this server. 
These users must be moved to a mailbox store on a different server 
or be mail disabled before uninstalling this server.
Facility: Exchange System Manager
ID no: c103f492
Exchange System Manager

Then Open AD and do a search for all users who have Exchange Home Server attribute set to the dead Exchange Server. Remove Exchange mailbox association if you find any users using the old server.

If you cannot see administrative or routing groups then: Right click your domain (exchange) container (THE HIGHEST LEVEL) go to properties check off the administrative views. "Display routing groups" and "Display administrative groups"

Finally: Delete all the old DNS records for the old server as well as any DHCP records then simply delete the old server from AD this is assuming you were able to transfer all the Schema roles.

Hope this helps.

Exchange 2003 to 2010 Transition – How to tell if Public Folders are in use and can be deleted

Even if nobody touches those files for 6 months, I still wouldn't let them disappear for a while. You'll save yourself a lot of potential headaches by replicating these PFs to the 2010 box and simply not making them accessible to the users, if you truly want to phase them out (I bet you can create the PF DB, replicate, then take it offline and get it off the exchange storage, if necessary). Document it thoroughly and keep the PF DB around for the longest retention period on your backups (I'd go with 5 years, myself).

It's CYA at it's finest. If nobody ever needs it, you 'wasted' maybe an hour fiddling with it. If they DO need it, you saved yourself a world of aggrivation. I can't tell you how many times I've been called on to resurrect a 2- or 3-year-old file.

Another alternative would be to pull all the data out & stuff it onto some kind of cheap NAS or offline backup. The idea of having to resurrect that Exchange 2003 server so you can restore the PFs from backup in order to retrieve one file... just sounds ugly.

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