Exchange 2003 Admins - Geeky help?

[jambo]

Hi All,
Spent today fighting with an Exchange 2003 Enterprise server that will not remove itself from the Exchange Infrastructure. There are no mailboxes on there, and only one mail store left. This claims that there are user mailboxes left on there so it can't be removed. There are only the 3 normal SMTP / System mail boxes in there. These cannot be deleted, purged, or moved. I've done just about everything I can think of. Any thoughts, this is driving me up the wall. I need to wipe the server clean but can't remove it from the Exchange system manager on the other Exchange servers because of this. Even when the server's off it won't remove it!


Any thoughts?


Jambo

[anna]

erm lots of thoughts but none that would be helpful!! ;)

[TSM]

have you followed

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Remove-Exchange-server-entire-Exchange-organization.html

loads of articles here
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=remove+exchange+server+from+manager&meta=

probably somthing to do with the datastores

[jambo]

Cheers All..

I've tried to follow the instructions, the problem is that I don't really care about getting it off the server (That's getting wiped anyway) but do need to drop it out of the Exchange organisation. Most of the instructions say to either run setup.exe to remove Exchange from the server & organisation or use Add/Remove programs. This worked fine on another server, but won't remove this one as it claims there are still user mail boxes on there. The Exchange System Manager also claims this but doesn't feel the need to show me said mailboxes. I have dismounted the store, moved the database files and remounted it to get it to create a new blank database, and that didn't help at all either :(


Thoughts?

Jambo