We currently have a single exchange 2003 server that has been hit by a virus, I have no access to system manager, as well as most operating system utilities, it appears the backups of this system have been affected as well. We are licensed for exchage 2010 and I have a server available and ready to use, my thought is to bring up the 2010 server and create new mailboxes for our users, however I have no current access to the 2003 organization, any advice on how to deal with this? Any advice on getting things back to normal would be greatly appriciated.

Hello Can you access your EDB file for Exchange 2003 from there you can export all the pst's using a third party recovery software. Thanks Mouzzam Hussain Visit to my Blog mouzzamh.wordpress.com

I should be able to pull the drives with the EDB and mount it on another machine, of course then the question is how likely are we to re-infect ourselves, no antivirus solution I've tried has been able to pick up anything. One thing that concerns me is what will happen with the exchange organization as I try to add the 2010 server, will it add to the 2003 organization or try to create a new one? (as I have no access to the 2003 system)

Disaster Recovery time isn't a great migration time. By that I mean that you really should focus on getting your Exchange 2003 operational instead of thinking that migration would be the way out of this predicament. What is blocking you from accessing the Admin Tools? Have you tried making use of Process Explorer and File & Regmon from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default to better make it clear what's happening under the covers?Jesper Bernle | Microsoft Community Contributor 2011 Awardee

At this point I've migrated and am working on clearing out bugs caused by the forced early migration, as for the Exch 2003 server, process explorer, antivirus and most admin tools have been disabled, anti-virus rescue disk is showing nothing, the server does not respond to things like requests to move mailboxes and other processes. I will look into file/regmon as it would help with some issues if I could get the 2003 back in a semi working order, but so far it's not been very productive, I've been working on computers as a hobby and then professionally since the 286 days and this ranks as one of the most completly virus disabled machines i've ever seen.

I'm guessing you will install a File-Level Antivirus on your new Exchange 2010, right? ;-) File-Level Antivirus Scanning on Exchange 2010Jesper Bernle | Microsoft Community Contributor 2011 Awardee

For all the good it will do, didn't help our 2003 server at all. Over recent years i've seen major av's like mcafee and symantec fail more than they work.