Exchange 2003 and error 0x8004011d

Since there are no answers for this I thought I would provide you with a hack that could fix this.

On your OWA front end servers set your 404 page to redirect back to the login screen.

Here is an article on how to do this in II7.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771076%28WS.10%29.aspx

Hopefully this will tide things over until you can completely remove 2003 from your organization. Obviously redirecting any 404 to the login page is not ideal.

The way you've described it, option 3 may not be the best for you (I'm confused why you didn't use option 2?). In fact, Method 3 makes less and less sense every time I read it (probably only because it's Saturday though).

Method 3: Restore a Mailbox from Backup to a Recovery Server

Use this method if the mailbox object in the recovery storage group cannot be matched to a user object in Active Directory that has the same msExchMailboxGUID value. This situation may occur if the user account is deleted from Active Directory or if the Exchange attributes are removed from the user account, and the mailbox in the Exchange store was not reconnected or was purged.

That aside, the following things spring to mind.

• Make sure your disk layout of your VM is the same as your production server. If you have separate volumes for Windows, Exchange DBs and Exchange Logs make sure these exist on the new VM with the same drive letters.
• In your restore, do a custom restore and untick the Public Folders. I've had a weird issue before where the Public Folders weren't in the backup (on purpose) and that messed up the Information Store restore for no good reason

You might also want to try something a bit different (although this is a bit more involved). Basically, totally blow away this VM (please uninstall Exchange properly though for your own sanity), start from absolutely nothing and restore each required component.

Make sure this VM is not connected to your production network

• Install Windows
• Update Windows to the same Service Pack level as the production server
• Restore the latest Active Directory backup you have onto this VM
• Install Exchange using the setup.exe /disasterrecovery switch
• Install the same Exchange Service Pack as the production server using the update.exe /disasterrecovery switch
• Try your restore again
• ExMerge the restored Mailbox into a PST and copy whatever is missing into their production Mailbox

Meta: You gotta love that KB article. It says This article describes two methods that you can use to recover or to restore a single mailbox in Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 then promptly gives you 3 options!