Manually Remove Exchange 2003 Storage Groups/Public Folder

If you've ever done an Exchange 2003 installation you know jut how painful they can be due to Exchange not wanting to remove itself due to safety checks that must be passed first.

These checks are a good thing but sometimes things get screwed up and the checks will never pass so you manually must remove a Storage Group or Public Folders DB but the Exchange Management Console stops you due to these safety checks.

So here is the how to.


WARNING:
ADSI Edit is a very powerful tool and you can easily break all of your Exchange org if you do something stupid. Use this as a last resort to remove a Store or DB after taking care of things like replicas.


Drill down to where you need to to delete the offending Store/DB and then restart the MS Store service on the server. If doing this on a remote DC the changes might take several minutes to replicate.

Once again ADSI Edit can easily destroy your entire AD organization so please be careful and only do this if absolutely necessary.

Configuration
+ CN=Configuration
+ CN=Services
+ CN=Microsoft Exchange
+ CN=YOUR ORGANISATION
+ CN=Administrative Groups
+ CN=First Administrative Group
+ CN=Servers
+ CN=SERVER NAME
+ CN=InformationStore