Hi,

I have a ex03 server and one of the storage groups had four mail stores, one of these was deleted a while back and I need to restore it to a recovery storage group to try and locate a mailbox. However the RSG does not see it in the add database wizard as it is no longer in AD. Furthermore I have tried to replicate the restore process in a lab but using ntbackup this fails with error 

Failed to find a database to restore to from the Microsoft Active Directory. Storage Group specified on the backup media

Just wondering what the process is to restore a deleted mail store to a RSG in exchange 2003, I know ex03 is end of life but as you can imagine its still being used by some organisations

Can you just create a storage group and database with the same name?

Here you go https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/824126 and once you get the DB restored if you want a GUI based tool to open , search, export, migrate or recover data check out Lucid8's DigiScope http://www.lucid8.com/product/digiscope.asp

Thanks for the feed back, Ed you cannot create the SG and DB and then add this to the RSG, tried this method I am guessing object attributes do not match.

Troy the MS article you supplied does not exactly explain on the scenario I have explained. The problem I am having is that I want to restore the mail store to the RSG but as it does not exist I cannot perform the restore also I cannot restore the files to windows volume / folder as if it was just a file type restore.

Strange as I cannot see any online technical reference for this scenario. If a business deleted a mail store and say months down the road releasied some data from it was needed does this mean it cannot be restored to exchange as the attributed no longer exist within AD?

ok so just for clarification you are saying the RSG does not exists, correct?  If so then have you tried creating the RSG and if so what type of error are you recieving?

I can create a new recovery storage group, however I cannot add in the mail store.

The way I understand this is that as the mail store does not exist (it was deleted) active directory does not have an object for it therefore I assume it would need to be restored into AD as well?

I guess the only way to restore data from a deleted mail store is to just restore the .edb someone, not the exchange application and then use a recovery tool such as didgi scope and read / extract the data from the .edb file?

The common scenario is that you need to restore a email or entire mailbox and you have a backup, also the mail store still exists in AD. In this example you can use RSG pick the relevant mail store and then restore the mail store and use exmerge to export the relevant data. However my real-life scenario is that the mail store does not exist anymore as it was delete, but there is a backup of the mail store

Hmm I could have sworn if you recreated the STORAGE GROUP that it used to be within it would work but its been some time since I used 2003 RSG so could be a limitation  and if so then yes DigiScope would be the answer