As  many of you know Exchange 2010 has introduced some new default mailboxes in Exchange 2010.  These mailboxes consist of a Discovery Mailbox and an arbitration mailbox.  These mailboxes are default and configured for on the first mailbox server you deploy. 

I happened to run into an issue this week dealing with a new Exchange Server that had a corrupt LUN.  The LUN happened to be the location of the Exchange 2010 installation files and the database.  As a result the database was lost along with the Discovery Mailbox and the arbitration mailboxes.   The server had not been released to production yet so thankfully no user mailboxes were on the server. 

When trying to remove the database I received the error that the database still contained mailboxes, they may be the discovery mailbox, archive, or arbitration mailboxes.  Going to my Exchange Management Shell (EMS) I typed the comment Get-Mailbox –Database “Databasename”.  The list came back with the Discovery Mailbox which is created when preparing AD.  The task I had to do was move this mailbox.  Well, since the database was offline I could not go about the traditional method of moving a mailbox in Exchange 2010 using the New-MoveRequest command.

I then thought, what about the –ConfigurationOnly switch?  That used to be a handy tool in Exchange 2007, but as I found out it wasn’t available!  I then went on a mission to figure out how to move this guy.  Well, as luck would have it I found an interesting article that talks to the new way to move a mailbox without moving the data.  Reading the article I leveraged the following command to move all the mailboxes (the discovery mailbox) from the lost database to the new database.  The command I ran was: Get-Mailbox –Database “LostDatabaseName” | Set-Mailbox –Database “NewDatabase”.  This allowed me to move the configuration information in Exchange to point the account to the other default database.  (I should note the danger with this command.  If you were do run it on a live production mailbox it would only move the configuration information of the user only, not the actual data in the database, so be careful!)

This worked great, the only other problem I had now were the Arbitration mailboxes.  In order to see the Arbitration Mailbox you have to run the command Get-Mailbox –Database “LostDatabaseName” –Arbitration.  This command will show me the list of Arbitration Mailboxes:

Now that I have identified the arbitration mailboxes I had to move them to the new database.  The problem is I can’t just do a Get-Mailbox –Database “LostDatabaseName” – Arbitration |
Set-Mailbox –Database “NewDatabase”.  When I run this command I receive an error stating “The Operation couldn’t be performed because object ‘domain.com/users/FederatedEmail.’ Couldn’t be found on domaincontroller.”  Bugger!

Seeing this error I figured I must be missing something.  Well, I figured that if I needed to specify a
“–Arbitration” in the command line then I need to specify it in the Set-Mailbox command.  So I ran the command Get-Mailbox –Database “LostDatabaseName” – Arbitration | Set-Mailbox
-Arbitration –Database “NewDatabase”.  The system then asked me to confirm the move and I hit Yes.  Now when I do the command Get-MailboxDatabase | Get-Mailbox –Arbitration I can see the mailboxes have moved!

See, Wasn’t that simple!

Hope you find this helpful out there, Please comment and share.