Exchange 2007 is cool. Seriously cool. It seems to me that Microsoft has finally got their act together and created a complete messaging system that works the way administrators and consultants want it to work. Sure, there are some areas that are a bit tough to get used to but any administrator worth their salary will be able to climb the learning curve with a bit of reading.

So anyway, I’ve been busily migrating the Trade Me Exchange 2003 server to Exchange 2007 over the last little while (we don’t use Exchange for site emails, just internal stuff). As far as staff goes Trade Me is getting bigger but still relatively small - about 100 staff members as I write this. To ensure the transition from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 went smoothly I read a whole load of docs before beginning the transition - the best one I found was a Microsoft Technet article titled How to Remove the Last Legacy Exchange Server from an Organization.

I got to the end of it and found that Exchange 2003 couldn’t be uninstalled because some mailboxes were still marked as having their Exchange home server set to the old server. Weird - I had moved all mailboxes to the new server. When trying to run the uninstall I got a message that said:

One or more users currently use this mailbox store. These users must be moved to a different mailbox store or be mail disabled before deleting this store.

ID no: c1034a7f
Exchange System Manager

Some googling found a lot of articles and blog posts written by people who had obviously experienced the same problem. There seems to be a number of solutions that’ve worked for various people but I found the one that worked for me in a Microsoft Technet article titled You receive a “c1034a7f” error message when you delete a mailbox store. This is the error I was getting but I wasn’t trying to remove a mailbox store (not directly anyway).

In this article I found the following section - it’s very simple but revealed to me which mailboxes were still on the old server.

Method 4: Use Active Directory Users and Computers to search for mailboxes that are on a mailbox store
1. Start Active Directory Users and Computers.
2. Right-click the domain that you want, and then click Find.
3. Click the Advanced tab, click Field, point to User, and then click Exchange Home Server.
4. In the Condition list, click Ends with, type the name of your Exchange computer, and then click Find Now.
5. If you are prompted to add the current criteria to your search, click Yes.
6. When you have identified which users have mailboxes on this store, you can use Active Directory Users and Computers either to move the mailboxes to a different store or to delete the user’s mailbox.

Once I had the list of mailboxes I was able to go through the normal Exchange tasks to move them to new server and remove the ones that weren’t needed anymore.

Sorted!

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Infrastructure, MSExchange