Disaster recovery - Big Time!!
Marcus Smaby
typhoon hit the island and destroyed much of the hotel and of course the
computers and all backup media ended up underwater. At my instruction, he
sent the drives from the server into a recovery company who claims to have
achieved a 100% recovery and has returned the data on new drives. This is a
small operation, but they take all their reservations via email and they are
all sitting in the Exchange server databases. The server was an old Pentium
2 system with SCSI drives. The system was not shut down gracefully as they
were taken by surprise. They were running NT 4.0 as a domain, and Exchange
5.5.
I have ordered a new Dell poweredge Server with SBS 2003 as a replacement
for the old server. I have in my garage an old P2 server that is of the
same vintage as the destroyed server, if that would be of any help.
Issues:
Original drives that were recovered were SCSI, data was returned on IDE
drives.
Exch5.5 was not shut down
NO BACKUPS - destroyed (both on-site and off-site)
How can I move this to Ex2003
My thoughts:
Image the drives for safety
Mount the drives in my old server
Attempt to boot (the HAL won't match - but can that be worked around?)
ExMove off all the mailboxes.
Copy the ExMoved mailboxes to the new server
ExMove them back in.
I need to keep this simple. This is a garage project to help out a friend
who has lost almost everything, but is brave enough to try and rebuild. He
needs the reservations to notify incoming tourists and keep future business
contacts. Basically, this is life or death for his business and his business
is a major source of income for the small island, population 3000.
Any suggestion, approaches, etc.
Kamagar (Yapese for 'Thank You')
Marcus
Dave Howe [MSFT]
wrote:
>Issues:
>
> Original drives that were recovered were SCSI, data was returned on IDE
>drives.
> Exch5.5 was not shut down
> NO BACKUPS - destroyed (both on-site and off-site)
> How can I move this to Ex2003
>
>My thoughts:
> Image the drives for safety
> Mount the drives in my old server
> Attempt to boot (the HAL won't match - but can that be worked around?)
> ExMove off all the mailboxes.
> Copy the ExMoved mailboxes to the new server
> ExMove them back in.
>
>I need to keep this simple.
Simple? Oh boy...
If this were my project, I'd first make sure that Windows NT or
Windows 2000/Active Directory was in place. Since you want to move to
Exchange 2003, I'd go ahead and get Active Directory/DNS up and
running.
I'd then install Exchange 5.5 on a member server that has the same
drive letter configuration as the original server (doesn't matter if
the drives are IDE or SCSI) using the same Org Name, same Site Name
(server name won't matter). Apply the same Service Pack/hotfixes that
were installed on the original Exchange 5.5 server. After
installation finishes, use Performance Optimizer to move the databases
and log files into the same disk locations as the original
configuration.
Next, stop the Information Store service, rename all instances of
MDBDATA folders, and create new/empty MDBDATA folders in their place.
Copy the recovered databases into the locations you specified in
Performance Optimizer. Open a command prompt and navigate to the
Exchsrvr\BIN folder and run the command ESEUTIL /MH <path to database>
for both the private and public information stores. This will produce
a report which contains the word STATE: which will either be
CONSISTENT or INCONSISTENT. If the state is inconsistent, you will
need to run ESEUTIL /P <path to database>. Next, you will need to
defragment the database(s) by running ESEUTIL /D <path to database>.
After that completes, run ISINTEG (-pri or -pub) -fix until there are
0 fixes remaining.
259851 XADM: Ramifications of Running the ESEUTIL /P or EDBUTIL /D /R
Command
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=259851
Now, attempt to start the Information Store service. If you get an
error -1011, don't sweat it. This database belonged to a different
Exchange server, so you need to patch it, which can be done by running
ISINTEG -patch. Do not do this unless you're prompted to do it. You
should now be able to start the Information Store service. Open the
Exchange 5.5 admin program and drill down and open the properties of
the Server object. Click on the Advanced tab, then click the
Consistency Adjuster button. I would then place checkmarks in the
first, second, and fourth boxes (not the third - never the third
(which can reset the home server value on all of your public folders)
unless instructed by Microsoft PSS). Then choose to filter on all
inconsistencies. After this runs, it *should* create all new Active
Directory accounts for each of your mailboxes. You should also be able
to log into each mailbox now with the Administrator account.
Which brings us to a crossroads:
Do you now install Exchange 2003 into this site and do a migration of
mailboxes?
Or do you simply ExMerge all the mail data from this Exchange 5.5
server to PST files, install Exchange 2003 clean and new in a new
forest, and ExMerge the data in?
For me, it would depend on just how big my Information Store is. If
it's 60 gigabytes, with a thousand users? Maybe I'd do the migration
path. If the store is 6 gigabytes with 30 users, then maybe I'd
ExMerge.
Installing Exchange 2003 into a Exchange 5.5 site and performing a
migration preserves one little thing - single instance storage. In
Exchange if I send a message with a four meg attachment to 10 users on
the same mailbox store, then only one copy of the attachment is saved
to the database and a pointer to the message is sent to all 10 users.
If I ExMerge, I will be taking 10 copies of that attachment to PST
files, then putting 10 copies of it into the new database when I
ExMerge the data in. If I move the mailboxes as part of a migration,
I should retain single instance storage without inflating the size of
my database.
Either way, there are plenty of migration white papers out there, and
the Exchange 2003 green books can help you through the installation
should you choose to install it clean and go with the ExMerge process.
Again, this is how << I >> would recover. You, however, may want to
consider downloading the Exchange 5.5 Disaster Recovery white paper
found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/administration/55/backuprestore.asp
---
Dave Howe
Microsoft PSS
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Kimono
I hope you're all okay over there, and don't worry about the computers by the sounds of things it could've been much worse.
David Sengupta [MVP]
FYI Aelita Recovery Manager for Exchange 2.0 (being released May 5th) will
be able to point to your unmounted and inconsistent priv.edb and pub.edb
files and can extract all items and either place them in a .pst file or
directly into mailboxes in a production Exchange environment (in case you've
built a new enviroment). If you have the appropriate transaction logfiles
on disk for the respective priv.edb or pub.edb files Recovery Manager for
Exchange will actually emulate Exchange and replay these logs to create a
consistent .edb file for you prior to allowing you to extract data.
If you're having to find specific data Recovery Manager for Exchange also
lets you search all mailboxes in store (prior to actually recovering any
items) both for message body/subject line content or even for specific
phrases within attachments.
Product info is at: http://www.aelita.com/products/recoverymanagerexchange/.
You can download the eval code from that site.
If you need any more info ping me offline at david dot sengupta at quest
NOSPAM dot PLEASE com.
D.
--
David Sengupta M.T.S., B.Sc., MVP, MCSE, MCSE 2000, CCA Ottawa, Canada
Exchange Reporting & Analysis: http://www.quest.com/messagestats/
Exchange FAQ - http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm
"Dave Howe [MSFT]" <da...@online.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:c21f90d2srmbphnf1...@4ax.com...
kim_...@hotmail.com
the first step will be to setup the NT4 server and exchange in place
as before.
This will enable you to test the amount of missing data from exchange
and is it possible to mount the database.
Secondly, prepare the NT 4 migration to 2k3 by setting up the w2k3
server then do a NT4 exchange servers by doing an inplace upgrade.
The above is just a starter, for a safer migration, it is best to have
2 hardware boxes then do a step by step migration.
Read this up
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;818645
"Marcus Smaby" <mrsmaby@@@msn.com> wrote in message news:<erxdUZb...@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl>...
james...@gmail.com
For more information - http://www.exchangedatabaserecovery.co.uk