Disconnected Microsoft Exchange 2003 mailboxes after migrating to a 2007/2010 mailbox server
March 8, 2011
Recently I experienced an issue where mailboxes that were migrated to an Exchange 2010 Mailbox server from an Excahnge 2003 Server were left in a disconnected state on the source Back-End server as seen below:
The mailbox is moved successfully from the source server to the destination server. This problem occurs because Exchange 2003 cannot delete the folder hierarchy of the mailbox on the source server during or after the move mailbox operation.
The fix for this is going into the Exchange Management Console on Exchange 2007/2010 and perform a local move request back to the original Exchange 2003 Mailbox Server and the move request should fail, but should also remove the disconnected mailbox from the Exchange 2003 Backend Server.
There is a hot fix available that doesn’t prevent this from happening, but logs events in the application logs that indicate that there was a failure during the move mailbox operation.
The link to the hot fix is here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940012
