Question : Manual move of mailboxes

Hi. I have recently migrated mailboxes from an exchange 2000 server to a new exchange 2003 server. All mailboxes migrated fine (via the 2003 wizard) except for 2 boxes. One has 24500 emails the other 12009. I have essentially taken down the old exchange 2000 server (stopped the iis related stuff). How can I move these email boxes? I've heard of exmerge but how does it work? Is there a manual way to do this?
Thanks!

Answer : Manual move of mailboxes

Greetings:

EXMERGE will let you extract the mailbox to a PST file.  We have used it for brick level backups while we were migrating people.  It's a GUI interface.  Look for the options button to specify what you want extracted.  In this case, select the two-step mode and extract the mailbox first.

Using the migration tool, you can skip corrupted items and create a failure report.  You may want to try that and set the number of corrupted items to skip.  Use exmerge to back up the mailbox to a PST first, and then try moving it.  We had about twenty mailboxes with problems, and I set the max at 5.  It seemed all of our mailboxes were users that had been here awhile, and the corruption was on emails with attachments.  With the many phases of virus scans that we used and outlooks security settings, I suspect attachments may have been stripped off at one time, and the email was corrupted.

The Exchange 2000 Server version of Exmerge is included on the Exchange 2000 Server CD in the Support\Utils\I386\Exmerge folder. To run the Exmerge utility, you must copy the Exmerge.exe and Exmerge.ini files from the CD to the ExchSrvr\Bin folder on the server's hard drive and run the .exe file from that location.  Exmerge.exe copies data from the source server into personal folder (PST) files and then merges the data in the personal folders into the mailboxes on the destination server.

In One Step mode, exmerge data from the source mailbox to a PST file in the first stepand then merge the data in the PST file into the same mailbox on the destination server. In this case, the mailbox on the destination server must have the same mailbox name and the same container path. The Distinguished Name (DN) of the mailbox on the destination server is obtained by replacing the Organization and Site names in the DN of the mailbox on the source server with the Organization and Sites names of the destination server.

Within exmerge is an option to "Archive data to target store".  Be aware that this will extract everything to a PST and then delete it from the mailbox.  It will warn you.  If you have admin access you can reimport it with exmerge, or using Outlook.

I hope this helps some.