Cleaning Up Ghost Move Requests

Hi folks,

I recently had another adventure which I would love to share with you.

I was working on getting rid of the default mailbox databases I ended up with some ghost move requests. When executing Get-MoveRequest cmdlet I saw the following warning:

Removing these move requests was not successful. When attempting to remove move requests I was presented with the error as below:

My investigation of this issue lead me to this thread on TechNet forum. It turned to be very close to what I was having, except for the value of msExchMailboxMoveStatus attribute which was different, however my scenario was different from the one that was discussed there. I was getting value of 1 which probably corresponds to the status value of Queued.

I have created query like below in Active Directory users and computers to retrieve these user objects in ADUC (alternatively ADSIEdit can be used to edit AD attributes on the low level):

When checking move request related attributes in AD I have discovered the following:

msExchMailboxMoveFlags 10

msExchMailboxMoveStatus 1

I have edited each of them and cleared the value as follows:

After clearing each object I would run Get-MoveRequest cmdlet which would clearly show me that the number of ghost mailbox move objects reduces till it finally disappeared when I cleaned all of the user objects.

So now, we are left with the orphaned user accounts. We simply delete them using Active Directory Users and Computers.

I hope this helps you as it helped me.

Enjoy!