Restoring Exchange 2003 database [ August 22nd, 2009 ] Posted in » Uncategorized
We had a number of issues on an SBS 2003 server where a server was hard shut off (Battery backup was accidentally shutoff by the client) during an automatic RAID rebuild. The main issue was Exchange failed to come back up when the server was turned back on.
It looked like the failure was due to the latest Exchange log not existing. Using eseutil it showed that both the private and public databases were in a Dirty Shutdown state. I figured it would not work, but I first tried a soft recovery. It failed because the log was missing.
I was not sure which process would be faster among a database repair or a database restore, but we chose the repair first, unfortunately. After it appeared the database recovery would be about 16-20 of more downtime, we cancelled the repair and began restoring the backup from the previous night. We had Backup Exec 10d at this client and can happily report that the restore was successful. A 30GB private store took about 4.5 hours to restore off a USB-based backup. One issue why it took so long is that this server does not have USB 2.0 ports.
Big UGH, but we were back up and running the next day. Another big reason to have something like Backup Exec System Recovery, the restore would have been a lot quicker.