Recovering emails from a dead exchange database

Solution 1:

At this point in time, if the emails are "super important" then I'd strongly suggest getting someone who does know exchange fully involved. I don't want to sound disrespectful, but this is not the best point to start learning from.

If you can't do that (though I really do think you should try - this situation sounds like it would benefit from an on-site look-over from an experienced exchange consultant), I'd suggest using out of band recovery tools - something that allows you to mount and inspect the information store outside of exchange. I use ontrack powercontrols when I help people to do this DR route, but there are other options out there.

How did you/whoever establish that exchange had a corrupted datastore anyway? That shouldn't happen because of one disk in a RAID array dropping out - either there was no fault (or at least no corrupt database issue) with the Exchange server or you still have an issue with this system that you need to discover and nail down before it goes wrong again.

Solution 2:

You can mount a recovered database using a Recovery Storage Group; this will not overwrite your production database, will perform full transaction logs replay (which will bring the database back to the point in time before the crash) and will let you extract messages from it and merge them into their mailboxes.

The process is relatively simple for someone who knows Exchange well; there are of course various tutorials around, but I agree with RobM: try to get someone involved who knows what he's doing.