Exchange DEAD! Server recovered but no users can log in

Solution 1:

I had an Exchange Server fail once, my guess is you haven't slept very well or at all since it happened. In my case I forked out the $500 or whatever it was to open a technical case with Microsoft. It was worth every peny, I recommend if the fix isn't immediately apparent to hand it over to the experts. I may get voted down for recommending this but I have to say the Exchange Support team was very good.

Solution 2:

If you have a recent backup of the mail store, restore from that right away. If not, before you do anything else, find the Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant and install it on your Exchange server. It will diagnose the database and tell you what needs to be done to mount it.

Technical explaination: You ran ESEUTIL /P. ESEUTIL is a low-level database utility that doesn't know about Exchange. The /P option is destructive: It will remove bad pages (that fail CRC) to make the database good. These bad pages, Microsoft points out, could be nothing, empty pages if you're having a good day. Or they could be someone's attachment. Or the root of their mailbox. Oops.

After running this tool, you need to run ISINTEG. This tool is Exchange-aware and will scan your db, fixing its errors and making it consistent. You may need to run this more than once as ISINTEG will not fix all errors in a single pass if there are many errors.

Just run ISINTEG until no more errors are reported.

Then mount your database.

Microsoft does not recommend leaving a repaired database in production. After, you may have to export your mailboxes with Exmerge, delete the old db, recreate empty user mailboxes and then merge the mail back in.

But if you had a recent backup, forget all that and just restore from that. I can't repeat that often enough.

Did I just say restore from backup?