Disaster recovery - Big Time!!

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From: Marcus Smaby (mrsmaby_at_@@msn.com)
Date: 05/04/04 

Date: Mon, 3 May 2004 23:01:01 -1000

I have a friend in Micronesia that runs a dive hotel. Recently a MASSIVE
typhoon hit the island and destroyed much of the hotel and of course the
computers and all backup media ended up underwater. At my instruction, he
sent the drives from the server into a recovery company who claims to have
achieved a 100% recovery and has returned the data on new drives. This is a
small operation, but they take all their reservations via email and they are
all sitting in the Exchange server databases. The server was an old Pentium
2 system with SCSI drives. The system was not shut down gracefully as they
were taken by surprise. They were running NT 4.0 as a domain, and Exchange
5.5.

I have ordered a new Dell poweredge Server with SBS 2003 as a replacement
for the old server. I have in my garage an old P2 server that is of the
same vintage as the destroyed server, if that would be of any help.

Issues:

    Original drives that were recovered were SCSI, data was returned on IDE
drives.
    Exch5.5 was not shut down
    NO BACKUPS - destroyed (both on-site and off-site)
    How can I move this to Ex2003

My thoughts:
    Image the drives for safety
    Mount the drives in my old server
    Attempt to boot (the HAL won't match - but can that be worked around?)
    ExMove off all the mailboxes.
    Copy the ExMoved mailboxes to the new server
    ExMove them back in.

I need to keep this simple. This is a garage project to help out a friend
who has lost almost everything, but is brave enough to try and rebuild. He
needs the reservations to notify incoming tourists and keep future business
contacts. Basically, this is life or death for his business and his business
is a major source of income for the small island, population 3000.

Any suggestion, approaches, etc.

Kamagar (Yapese for 'Thank You')

Marcus

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