Today I had the honor of working with a company after a catastrophic failure of their Exchange server. One day their hardware was working just fine, the next the server will no longer boot and Exchange is down.
As part of the repair, I installed Exchange 2000 on a new server, and attempted to mount the databases from the mirrored drive. After a few manual uninstalls of Exchange and the the typical passes with ESEUTIL to repair the dirty shutdown the database was coming up clean, but still would not mount.
Checking the Application event log, I found that the server was built in the wrong Exchange Organization. Ugh! As Microsoft states repeatedly, to change the Org, one must reinstall Exchange. In Exchange 5.5 it was so bad, that we would worry about the case of the Organization name when adding new servers to an Exchange site.
That was COMPANY and not Company for the Organization name, right??
In 2000 and 2003, I've always understood that this had not changed. Plan ahead and do it right the first time. So, I started an uninstall of Exchange 2000 off this client's server while scouring Technet and Google for a better solution. Of course, as soon as I started the uninstall, I found that Exchange will NOT uninstall because it sees mailboxes are still on the server. Despite not successfully mounting, it must have partially mounted the database and Exchange now thinks they are on the server.
Using the Manual uninstall procedure again, I remove Exchange one more time, do another reinstall, but this time it also fails. Exchange never asked me to change the Organization as it is still registered in AD. Oh well. That's when I found this tool. LegacyDN.
Like RegEdit, this tool has tons of disclaimers:
Never use [name of tool] on a production database, never use unless you have backups, never use on unless you have PSS on hold on the phone and we tell you to run it..
So, I closed my eyes, crossed my fingers and double clicked on it. By default it comes up in read-only mode. I immediately see that it found the First Administrative Group on the server. Clicking on the fields do nothing, but I can see I have hope. So I close it, and reopen it in /FORCEWRITE mode. Click and the Organization field populates. I replace the text with the correct entry, click Update, wait 30 seconds and "The Organization has been updated successfully.". I imagine that my 30 second wait was in part to only having 8 mailboxes in this information store. If this had been a store with a couple hundred or thousand mailboxes, this process may have taken much longer.
Now the database mounted successfully and all is happy. The users can send and receive email without issue. Next, migrate them to Exchange 2003...
Some useful references.
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