Old Story***Exchange 5.5 migration gone wrong

I couple of years ago when we were in the midst's of migrating from exchange 5.5 to exchange 2003 we had planned the process for weeks. Myself and a consultant that I've used for a long time set a date for a Saturday morning. Early morning to get a head start. We had both servers ready. New and old (I mean real old).

We started the day by installing 2003 server on the new box as well as exchange 2003. We added if the server to the Organization and both servers were talking. We ran tests and check the whole way and everything was looking fine. We went back to the 5.5 server to load up the tools to do mailbox move. With NT 4.0 and Exchange 5.5 everything needed a reboot. We proceed to reboot the server. It shuts down and comes up in a BSOD. Blue Screen of Death.....WTF. We do a hard restart and cross our fingers. Same thing when it restarted BSOD. We put a call into Microsoft and after an hour on the call it boils down to reinstalling the OS. So we do that and exchange is pretty much F@&%ed.

We were able to see the files that represent both stores. We copy the stores over to another server as a near line backup just in case. but at that time both stores were about 130GB in total. That took at that time a few hours to copy. Once that was done copying we reinstalled exchange 5.5 and service packs. Once this was done we had to copy the data back to the exchange 5.5 server. So that took another few hours to copy back. It's going from evening to night now. The files are done copy but we have to run ISinteg and other tools to defrag the database stores. We locate another area on the network to defrag the store to. Now this process takes a few more hours. Once the defrag process is done we had to remove the old data base store and copy the newly defraged ones back to the server. This was going to take a few more hours to copy.

During these night time copying we decide to attempt to sleep. there is no place comfy to sleep in the office so I grab some old boxes and lay them out on floor. One of my coworkers (female) had a sweater on her chair she leave at work for when the office gets cold, I used that to keep worm that night. Shhh, don't tell her. So I get a nap on the floor and Sunday morning rolls around.

I am now here a full 24 hours. the files are done copying. We attempt the start the exchange 5.5 services and they come up. So we are now back to square one where we were 24 hours before. We install the tools again and cross our finger that the server does not again BSOD. The server reboots and all is fine. Now we are using the mailbox move tool to move hundreds of mailboxes over to the new server. This too takes time so we wait and watch one by one moving over (in groups of 10). It's midday on that Sunday and we are about half way done with the mailboxes. We still have the 80GB with of public folders to do after this. We ended up finishing all mailboxes sometime in mid afternoon. We run tests to see if emails are working on the new server and they are.

Half the battle done now for the public folders. To get these over is different from the mailbox move wizard. I can't remember what processes were available at the time but I ended up exporting my entire public folder to a file and importing it in my new exchange 2003 server. This caused problems b/c not all of the data was exported/imported. My public folders run deep and has many sub folders. So of the sub folders either didn't show up in the new server or the contents were missing. So I had individually export and import specific folders. All of this importing, exporting took the rest of Sunday night into Monday morning. I was done for the most part my Monday 9am.

I still didn't go home. As users began to login I stuck around to make sure everyone was OK with Outlook and accessing anything in the new Exchange 2003 server. I got a few calls about the data in the public folders not being there but that was an easy fix. Export, import. I ended up going home about 4pm Monday afternoon and still went in on Tuesday regular time. The missing data calls kept coming in months after the migration was complete but I kept the old exchange 5.5 online and unplugged from the network just in case. To this day I still have that old server sitting there and I am now ready to throw it out for good. If calls about missing data come up we tell them that data has been removed for good.

I was at work for about 52 hours straight that time. No shower, no shave, no teeth brushing (ginger ale :D) no deodorant, no change of cloths and hardly ate. I was a mess but I got the job done and that's all that mattered to me. Yes I have been though the trenches and that was the last time I laid my head to floor at work either but I'll leave that story for another time.