Adventures in Server restore
- From: "Andy Cobley" <acobley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 11:22:42 +0100
I thought I'd pass on my experience in bringing back an exchange server
that has gone bad. Basically, although I had done some test backup and
restore exercises, a real restore turned out to be far from easy.
Basically On Friday night (around midnight) something happened to corrupt
the priv.edb. I'm not sure what happened (but a online backup was going on)
I started to get the following messages in the event viewer.
"Information Store (1932) First Storage Group: The database page read from
the file "F:\mdbdata\priv1.edb" at offset 6660096 (0x000000000065a000) for
4096 (0x00001000) bytes failed verification due to a page checksum mismatch.
The expected checksum was 3713556033693036075 (0x3389338991c82e2b) and the
actual checksum was 7734955069946726443 (0x6b5814a791c8082b). The read
operation will fail with error -1018 (0xfffffc06). If this condition
persists then please restore the database from a previous backup. This
problem is likely due to faulty hardware. Please contact your hardware
vendor for further assistance diagnosing the problem. "
The mail service did continue to run though.
On Saturday whilst trying to do a RSG restore from backups things went from
bad to worse and eventually the server crashed and continued to crash with
random errors in the event log. I thought it may be a virus, but a check
revealed not. I did manage to use Exmerge to extract to PST the users
mailboxes.
The server continues to crash, sometimes not letting me log in. I decided a
Dialtone recovery would be best. However I couldn't create a new blank
database. Thanks to Rich Matheisen for pointing out that to create the new
dialtone database I needed to move the log files to a new location,
essentially deleting them form the server. So now I've got a diatone
database and people can send and receive mail.
Next up, use Exmerge to bring back the pst files from Saturday. Bad move,
one of them must have contained the data that was corrupting the database
and the server started crashing again with blue screen dumps. I have to
admit I was losing what little hair I had left. For good measure the IIS
file MetaBase.xml had become corrupt (presumably because of the crashes)
causing Exchange services not to start correctly. This was restored from a
system backup.
The only solution was to disable the exchange services to get the server
stable. Then create a new dialtone database (thus losing any mail received
this morning, a backup couldn't be created because the server was only up
for a couple of minutes at a time.) This has now allowed me to get the
server running again. I'm going to run it for a day like this just to
confirm it's stable.
However I can't restore from the pst files on Saturday. So I'm going to
have to go back to older backup files to get the users mail back.
Andy C
.
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