So if you are a nerd like me, its entirely possible you have a home domain
I created one, and installed exchange 2013.
Sadly, I installed it on a virtual and the host box had an issue
The vhdx for the mail server was on the drive that failed
I hadnt gotten to backing it up yet
Anyway, I now had an orphan set of structures in the active directory
You will find out when you go to create the new mail server, and it starts nagging you for a recovery
It thinks you will be able to restore it.
Wasn't happening
So you can recover from this without recreating the entire domain, which is a hassle
You have to remove all remnants of exchange from the ad directory stuff
There is a great article on how to do it
Go here - http://blog.dargel.at/2012/11/20/complete-remove-exchange-2013-using-adsiedit/
However, thats not all of it
I had a few accounts that had mailboxes created for them on the old server
They showed up in the new server, but it was whining about the mailbox database being corrupt and lost
Which is correct.
So the last steps you need to do is to get rid of the accounts in exchange using ecp
You can do it for the non-privileged accounts by just disabling the account in exchange
This will clean up all the entries
When you try to do this on administrator, it wont work
There isn't enough privilege on the ecp web site to do it
You have to do it by hand with ADSI Edit
Go through all the administrator properties and clear out the ones that have to do with exchange
They usually start with msExch
However, there are some non-obvious ones
They are not in the msExch range
The way I found them was to compare a user without a mailbox created to one that is
Its a pain, but it works
The final kicker, ADSI Edit doesnt know how to edit everything
Eventually you will have to use powershell to clear out the remaining attributes with the set-aduser cmdlet
There is one for msExchPolicy and msExchWhenMailboxCreated that wouldnt clear except this way
But its possible!
