Exchange 2003 Disaster recovery

With a good backup in hand and Exchange databases and logfiles on different hard drives, it is no problem to recover from an Exchange disaster.Just restore the data from backup and initiate a roll forward of the transaction logs. Well done, the Exchange information store goes online.

But what should you do when your backup isn’t readable or you don’t have a backup? Here’s how these tools come to play.

Before you start:

  • Make sure that the databases are really not startable
  • Check the Application log for Exchange events that can tell you the cause of the failure
  • Make a backup of the database
  • Restart the server so that a soft recovery can be done

ESEUTIL /P parameters

ESEUTIL /p repairs a corrupted or damaged database. Ensure that you have a minimum of 20% free disc capacity in association to the Exchange database size.


Figure 9: ESEUTIL repair modus

Example:

ESEUTIL /P „c:\program files\exchsrvr\mdbdata\priv1.edb“ /Se:\exchsrvr\mdbdata\priv1.stm /Te:\tempdb.edb

This command will repair the database PRIV1.EDB. If you have no .STM file, you can create one with ESEUTIL /CREATESTM. Read more about this here.

After running ESEUTIL, you can open a detailled logfile called >database<.integ.raw to see the results.

As a last Step run ISINTEG –fix -test alltests. You can read more about ISINTEG later in this article.

Note: Sometimes you must run the fix over and over again till it fix all problems. Its like a defrag of a harddrive

Source: http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Exchange-ISINTEG-ESEUTIL.html