Hi Peter,

I am not sure if the problem I have is in your area of expertise but will ask anyway and maybe you can consult the other experts. I think the problem encompasses a range of expertise areas.

A clients exchange server crashed and they took it to an IT company for repairing. Now let me just say that they had serveral years worth of emails on there without having has any backup of any kind done over that period. (Yeah I know...sounds far fetched but its true!!!)

This particulat IT company bought a new server (windows server 2003) and set up a new domain and exhange server (exchange 2000) for them (the client) (using all the old setting etc). What data (documents and exchange mail boxes) they could recover; they did through an authoritative restore.

Now the problem begins when they are trying to retrieve the mailbox data through the new exchange mail setup. This is where I've come into the picture.

Having pondered the problem for a while, I have come up with an (very broad) approach to solving this problem which is as follows:

1. Setup server 2003 on another machine
2. Configure exchange 2000 on this machine
3. Perform authoritative restore on the recovered exchange mailboxes to this machine
4. Hopefully this will enable access to the emails and avoid problems relating to SID's etc.

Now what I would like to know is:

1. Confirmation that this is the right approach.
2. As outlined above, I understand that this is a very bare bones approach. I need more information i.e. details to cover the above scope hence any information you can give me or refernce to material on the internet that will be of help.
3. What sort of problems (if any) I may encounter and tips to resolve and/or avoid.

Thanks