Don’t you just love it when a client’s exchange server decides to lockup and then fail to mount when it comes back up. Even better when it happens 1 hour before knockoff time…
Well this one had me stumped for a while. It is quite a large database (for SBS 2003) edb+stm = around 60Gb
Here are the steps that I looked at to get it working again.
First things first – check in the event logs…
Heaps of
and for every user that uses activesync to sync iPads/iPhones etc…
I tried to Mount the Private store and this error appears…
I check the consistency of theexchange databases using…
“ESEUTIL /mh priv1.edb”
Dirty Shutdown – OK. There were some un-played log files so I performed a soft recovery which was successful.
An example of this would be “eseutil /r e00 /l [log_path] /d [database_path]“
In this example the logs start with e00. If your logs and database are in different locations you can use the /l and /d parameters.
Clean Shutdown being reported now – great! Still getting 9518 on attempting to mount store. By this stage I knew I had ShadowProtect Backups of the entire server so I decided to recover the exchange from a short while before it locked up.
I stopped the Information Store service. Moved the existing store to another folder and recovered the entire exchange (which sits on a second drive – not the system drive) folder with .stm, .edb, .chk and .log files. If your checkpoint (.chk) files are still located on the C:\ drive you may need to recover those too.
Tried to mount store – failed. Removed checkpoint files, replayed log files. Tried to mount store – same Event ID 9518. Back to the drawing board.
Time to try a defrag on the databases.
eseutil /ms “priv1.edb”
eseutil /ms “pub1.edb”
Both successful. Attempt mount again – failed event ID: 9518. OK – something else going on here. I don’t really want to perform a hard recovery if I don’t have to. The databases actually seem to have pretty good integrity.
This server was running exchange 2003 SP2. So I downloaded the Service Pack again and ran it over the existing install. If your server is only running SP1 then probably run that. It asked for a reboot.
Upon reboot – guess what. Log files replayed and Stores are mounted!
The Moral of the Story…
Never give up.
Even if you can’t find a solution on Google (which I couldn’t in this case) try to think outside the box.
Remember – There is always Microsoft PSS if you are really stuck.
