STEPS FOR PERFORMING HARD RECOVERY ON EXCHANGE 2007
ESEUTIL tool should be used to
perform the soft and hard recovery on Exchange. Hard recovery of exchange
database is done only when the database is in dirty shutdown state (after soft
recovery) /database is corrupted / logs are missing.
ESEUTIL / p is the command for performing hard recovery.
Below are the detailed steps for performing hard recovery on
damaged /corrupted database:
·
Command for hard recovery:
Eseutil / P “Database name”
Eg:
C:\Exchsrvr\Bin>eseutil /p “D:\Exchange\Mailbox Store.edb”
·
You will be prompted with a warning dialog box, Click OK.
Note: Recovery
process may take time depending upon the level of database corruption,
available hardware resources. The repair runs at approximately 4 to 6 gigabytes
(GB) per hour.
·
Once the recovery is completed, offline
defragmentation should be done on the repaired database. For running
defragmentation, the hard drive should be having 110 % of the database that you
want to defrag.
·
To defrag, the following is the command:
Eseutil /d “database name”
Eg: C:\Exchsrvr\Bin>eseutil /d “D:\Exchange\Mailbox Store.edb”
·
You will be prompted to confirm the action, please confirm the same.
·
Once the Defragmentation is completed, then
integrity check should be done on the defragmented database. Before proceeding
with integrity check, Mount the store & Dismount the store immediately
after the completion of offline defragmentation.
·
To run integrity check, Isinteg command should
be used.
Note:
1.
Isinteg should be run only on offline datastore.
2. Isinteg
runs at approximately 3 to 6 GB per hour. (These rates are average; performance
may vary depending on how many passes the repair has to make on your database
and the speed of the hardware.
·
To run integrity check, following is the
command:
isinteg -s (SERVER) -fix -test
alltests
eg: C:\Exchsrvr\Bin> isinteg -s (mailserver) -fix -test alltests
You are prompted to select the database to be
checked just like below:
-----------------------------------------------------------
Index
Status
Database-Name
Storage Group
Name: First Storage Group
1
Offline
Mailbox Store (servername)2 Offline Public Folder Store (servername)
--------------------------------------------------------------
·
Enter a number to select a database.
·
Once the selection is done, you will be prompted
for Confirmation, type Y for Yes and N for NO.
·
You receive a summary report that indicates the
number of tests that were run, the number of warnings, and the number of errors
found, the number of fixes attempted, and the time it took for the program to
run. If there are any warnings, errors, or fixes, run the command again until
the count is Zero.
·
Once it is completed successfully, then mount
the database.
Best practices:
We recommend that you follow these
best practices (as per Microsoft) when repairing a database:
- Do not use the Eseutil repair option when you can restore from backups without any data loss.
- Hard recovery should be done if the soft recovery is failed or the database is still in dirty shutdown state using ESEUTIL.EXE tool.
- Eseutil tool should be used only on damaged /repaired database.
- Do not allow a repaired database to remain in production for an extended period of time.The best way is to create a new database and move the mailboxes from the repaired database.
