Hello,

My exchange server crashed and was not recoverable. the AD is also lost. To use e-mail we switched to office 365, but our old e-mails are not in office 365. I have the EDB file and setup a new AD and exchange server in VMware (new domain) and I am trying to mount the database from the old domain\server. I am having no luck.

old setup: Windows server 2008 / exchange 2013

new setup: Windows server 2012 / exchange 2013

can anyone help me out? any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Willem

To restore the server or at least EDB file, you need to restore it in same Exchange organization so you would need to start off from restoring the Active Directory. Second point is to have same database schema version you also need to know what was the CU on the crashed E2013 server ...

Database portability - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd876873(v=exchg.150).aspx

I guess the option you have is to use third party utility which can recover the data from EDB file directly and dump to PST file.

Amit is correct, however if you do not have the ability to restore AD or want to start fresh check out Lucid8's DigiScope product http://www.lucid8.com/product/digiscope.asp as it can open an offline EDB and recover all data without the need for AD or even a live Exchange Server

Hi Willem,

Have you backed up your AD information?

Please restore your AD firstly from backup, then follow Amit's reference to recover the Exchange database information to your new database.

Regards,

.edb files can't cross major OS versions. It's the same reason why servers in the same Dag need to be the same OS version. The reason is because Unicode sort ordering changes in major versions of Windows to meet latest and greatest localization requirements, and as a side effect the .edb file isn't going to be readable on a different OS.

As all said below we need to know the organisation name for the database to be mounted

If you dont know the organization name we can find from the database by running the below command

find /i "=ou" <path of database and database name" | more

i remmber using the above command in Exchange 2003 not sure  if this runs on exchange 2013 Database

You can give it a try If it works reinsatll exhcange 2013 with new org name and then try to install

If this is a org name issue we are suppose to see an event 1088 (if my memory is right)