Help Exchange Recovery

[Dave Benet]

We have just had a major flooding of our offices. Thankfully the server did
not suffer any water damage, or so we thought. It was shut down properly
and moved to a safe location and stayed dry. Later in the day, we setup the
server, a couple of workstations, networking, internet and printing in an
attempt to restore the business to operational status.

After connecting everything up, the server was powered up and we received a
STOP C0000218 error saying the Software hive of the registry was corrupt.
Unfortunately our ERD was in a location that did get very wet and the disk
was not readable.

I used the recovery console to rename winnt\system32\config\system to
system.bad and copied over the backup copy from the repair directory. This
copy was way out of date and did not allow many services or applications to
start at all. However, Windows 2KServer now will boot up and allow us to
login. I re-installed Backup Exec to perform a restore of the registry from
tape.

It appears our tape drive has somehow been rendered inoperative by all the
moisture, dust and such from falling debris. Backup Exec does not recognise
when a tape has been put in the drive. So we ran the diagnostic utility
from Sony for our SDT-11000 DDS4 drive. It confirmed that the drive is
inoperable.

We ran chkdsk on both drives and it did clean up numerous errors on the
system volume. I'm assuming this was the source of the registry corruption.
The drive appears to be healthy now and the data is intact. So we have
access to all of the company files.

My question is what would be the best way to recover the data out of
Exchange? I can access the exchngsvr directory, but we don't have access to
a proper backup of the message store and logs from Backup Exec.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Dave Benet
Melbourne Australia

[Susan Bradley, CPA aka "Ebitz" SBS Rocks [MVP]]

Dave - this is one of those times you need someone to hold your hand. You may
need also someone from the SBS team - get coffee - lots of it - you may need to
get up early or stay up late to get the North Carolina or Texas SBS PSS team.

This is a call PSS time. This is a call Veritas time.

Susan

[Dave Benet]

Susan,

Not being one to give up easily. I've performed a test restoration by
cobbling together an emergency server using one of the workstations from the
office and some ram from the other workstations to give me a system with
512MB or RAM.

1. I performed a full backup of all the drives on the server to disk on a
"emergency server". With the intention of trying an Exchange database
recovery from an offline backup.

2. Installed SBS with the same service packs and patches as the failing
server on the emergency server. Defined all users using the new user wizard
and NOT creating mailboxes for them.

3. Installed Backup Exec on the emergency server from the previous step.

4. Stopped the Mailbox and Public folder stores in Exchange System Manager.
Restored the exchsrvr\mdbdata directory from the backup taken in step 1 on
the emergency server.

5. Followed the procedures in Q296788 to perform a restore from an offline
backup. However ESEUTIL /MH showed a "Dirty Shutdown".

6. Ran ESEUTIL /P to bring the database into a consistent state.

7. Remounted the mailbox and public folder stores sucessfully.

8. Reconnected the mailboxes to their corresponding users.

9. Used OWA to verify access to each users e-mail sucessfully.

Now I feel confident in completely blowing away the exsiting SBS install on
the failing server, deleting and rebuilding the raid array and re-installing
SBS from the ground up.

And I saved myself from overdosing on caffine and running up a big overseas
phone bill.

One thing for sure, their is going to be an ERD kept up to date and with a
second copy off-site from now on!

Dave Benet
Melbourne Australia

"Susan Bradley, CPA aka "Ebitz" SBS Rocks [MVP]" <sbra...@pacbell.net>
wrote in message news:3D8C0AC7...@pacbell.net...

[Kevin Weilbacher]

Good luck, Dave. You have reminded *all* of us of the importance of that
ERD diskette.

I had one place that I worked that was building a new computer room which
literally backed up to the men's restrooms. You got it --- the restrooms
backed up, all right ... what a mess. Fortunately, no computer damage.
:-)
-kw

"Dave Benet" <nos...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:uTWhU7VYCHA.1788@tkmsftngp12...

[Susan Bradley, CPA aka "Ebitz" SBS Rocks [MVP]]

And done after each security patch.

[johnpe...@gmail.com]

Lepide Exchange Manager (in short LEM) is an unique utility consisting of advanced features that performs group of operations in Exchange Server. The tool efficiently and effectively restores elements of Exchange Server using available backup, performs EDB files recovery and fulfills requirements regarding Email regulatory.
For more information - http://www.exchangedatabaserecovery.co.uk