Here is the background: Before I got on the scene: AD/Mail server (Exchange 2003) crashed (hdd failure). The AD/Exchange orgwas recreated on new temporary hardware. I (suspect) user accounts where manually recreated (see later why i suspect). Email flow restored but no access to emails prior to crash date. In the meantime,permanenthardware has been put into place running Exchange 2007 SP1 and all mailboxes moved from the temporary Exchange 2003 server to 2007 box. Now we are attempting to restore the old emails from a backup file. On the Exchange 2003, restored the mailbox database to Recovery Storage Group. Database mounts and I can see the mailboxes. Issue is where to go from here... I tried to run exmerge to just dump the RSG into PST files. exmerge extract complains the mailboxGUID cannot be found for anyone and stops. That's why i suspect the user accounts were recreated, i.e the users now all have new mailboxGUID. I tried the hack in this article (http://forums.msexchange.org/How_to_recover%2Fextract_the_mailbox_from_the_Recovery_Storage_Group/m_1800436224/tm.htm) to try to link back an RSG mailbox to a new dummy user, however I got the complaint that the legacyExchangeDN for that user already exists. So to go further with this hack I need an exchange in a different forest. Not looking into rebuilding a whole new server for this.Is there a (free) way to simply dump the RSG into PST files without regard to AD? I can then import them on the Outlook side. If not, what other options do I have here?

Progress update: I found another article that suggested changing the msExchMailboxGuid attribute of the user in AD to the one mentioned as missing in the exmerge.log file,re-running exmerge to extract and then changing the GUID back to its original value. I have tested this with one account and it does do the trick, however, the caveat is that during the extraction new emails are sent to some fanthom mailbox that's not accessible once the GUID is put back to original value. Maybe have to dismount the 2007 store to prevent all email traffic into mailboxes while doing this....