Show and move “hidden” Arbitration mailboxes in Exchange Server 2010

So, let’s say you have a new installation of Exchange Server and you want to move all mailboxes, including Arbitration, from the default database created during the installation to a new mailbox database. Here is how to do it…

 

First of all, if you just try to delete the default database you will get this message:

 

 

Stating that the database isn’t empty, even though it does look empty if you do a get-mailbox for the specific database:

get-mailbox -Database “Mailbox Database 1905367170”

 

 

There is a switch that you should use if you want to see all mailboxes, even the “hidden” Arbitration mailboxes:

get-mailbox -Database “Mailbox Database 1905367170” –Arbitration

 

This gives us different result then the first get-mailbox command:

 

 

As you can se the database isn’t as empty as we first thought. To move these mailboxes to the new database you can easily pipe the result of the get-mailbox command and create new move requests for all Arbitration mailboxes:

get-mailbox -Database “Mailbox Database 1905367170” -Arbitration | New-MoveRequest –TargetDatabase “MailboxDatabase1”

 

 

So, good luck with the moves and please let me know if you bump in to any problems, thanks for reading!