So last Monday, one of my co-workers decided to install Xen Guest Tools on our only Exchange (2013 SP1) server in the middle of the day. It killed our remote sessions, the console view, and the mail flow. It was followed by a forced reboot which led to Windows booting into a black screen - Xen Guest Tools had installed faulty drivers. Eventually getting in through safe mode, we cleared out the now-faulty drivers for the NIC and were able to get the machine on the network again. It started Exchange and mail started flowing again, but even with the service restored, we have no console and all RDP connections fail - even after reconfiguring it remotely to accept them.

Since we could connect to the server via Powershell, MMC, and even ECP, it was left alone for a week while we considered the best option to migrate the databases to a healthy server.

Today we brought up a new Exchange server, which joined the administrative group without issue, both servers and their databases are visible in the ECP and in Powershell. However, any attempts to move the mailboxes to the new server just queue up and never move. When the command was run from ECP, it shows up in ECP and stalls at syncing. When it was run from the new mail server, it doesn't appear in ECP and stalls at queued.

We also tried creating a DAG and creating database copies on the new server, but while the new server becomes a DAG member the old one errors out. So we currently have two Exchange servers, one is healthy but has no mailboxes, and the other is unhealthy and has all the mailboxes. We're just not sure how to move forward, given what has already failed.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Edit: Environment Information - Exchange 2013 SP1, Running on Windows Server 2012R2, 1 AD site, no CAS/DAG/TMG/Third Party apps. I don't know what logs to post, but am willing to once I know which would be most useful.

Update: Okay so this is where things stand now - we're following all the steps for the database portability feature, but when the database is remounted, it looks like it is spawning a blank mailbox database instead of using the one we had copied over, but it does overwrite all the log files. To try it out, we changed the .edb file to match the new database name, and then it just fails to mount period.

The steps we have been taking can be read here, here, and here.

Update2: Database portability issue fixed, was a version mismatch between the servers. Thanks to everyone's help. : )