I've had a clients exchange server get shut down abnormally which resulted in a corrupt database
I've tried running the ESEUTIL tool in repair mode – after 4 hours or so it says corruption if fixed but then trying to mount the store again still throws an error and running and integrity check against the database says its still corrupt
So I've backed up the files and remounted the stores letting exchange create new files – thinking I can connect outlook back up and it will sync its data back to exchange
Outlook connects to Exchange but when doing a send recive throws an error stating 'You don't have appropriate permission to perform this operation'
Something I did threw up an dialogue saying something about not the correct mailbox, not sure exactly as I can't get it to come up again now
Any ideas how I can recover from this? Bar backing up outlook to a psd, removing and readding the exchange account and then restoring the psd (did this once before, but with 10 machines this takes some time!)
Thanks
Dave
Best Answer
Do you have any backups of the database/logs from before the crash?
What ESE/JET errors do you get when you try to mount the database? You'll see these in the application eventvwr. Specific JET errors will point to why the database is not mounting. Then do a search on the error to find out exactly what the error is talking about. Sometimes the errors given are esoteric and don't mean what you think they should.
Couple things with that. By remounting the stores and letting Exchange create new files, do you mean that you created empty databases to bring the IS back online with no mail? If that's the case, I think you're very limited in your recovery options. You won't be able to just remount the old EDB and have everything work like it used to. You're best option at that point would be to set up an RSG and use ExMerge to pull the mail from the old EDB and pump it to the new one.
Secondly, Outlook is just a client that connects to the Exchange server and pulls the data from it. If you connect the client to Exchange, it will not upload its' copies of mail to the EDB.
Repair databases: blogs.technet.com/exchange/archive/2004/06/18/159413.aspx
ExMerge: msexchangeteam.com/archive/2004/07/01/171051.aspx
RSG (Recovery Storage Group): www.msexchange.org/tutorials/How-Recovery-Storage-Groups-Work.html
You can also use a third party tool to try to repair the DB and pull and restore email like this one: www.mailretriever.net/index.html. That's just the one that I'm familiar with, but there are other products on the market you can look at as well. I'm not an endorsement monkey.
Also, my rep is too low to post a lot of links in here, so copy and paste to your browser.