Moving servers after a large crash, need advice, possible corruption?

[eod]

A few weeks ago, our exchange 5.5 sp4 server began to randomly lock up. The whole server would lock up. Nothing seemed to show much in the event logs other than it unexpectedly shut down. After one of the lock ups, the information store wouldn't start.

* Could not get the store off any of the backups (fixed that now)
* eseutil /d would fail
* ran through with eseutil /r /ispriv (successful, store would start)
* isinteg -pri -fix -test alltests (failed with "JET Error Unknown error while opening the IS Databases.")

The failure of isinteg made me pretty nervous, as well as having to run a hard repair on the store. Even though isinteg failed, I was able to get the store up. We've actually been limping along on the current store without any real issues since that night.

Anyways the server is old and we had planned to migrate off it anyways. I got a new server and am planning on migrating over to it (win2k). Question is:

* Do I use the Ed Crowley server move method (

http://www.swinc.com/resources/exch...sectionName=The Ed Crowley Server Move Method

). If so, would there be a chance that I'd end up copying possible corrupt portions of the information store db? Or during the mailbox move does it recreate it enough to essentially "rebuild" it? I'd prefer to do this because of the zero downtime.

Or

* Do I export every mailbox to a pst file. Start fresh, create each account by hand, then import each corresponding pst file?

Our organization has about 35 people and the store is about 9 gigs.

 

[DestinysDream]

The Crowley version seems about right but the first thing I would do is ensure that I have a good usable backup just in case something does go wrong and it always does. Have you ever had to do a restore before? Are you able to mount your backups? Where it says leave the old server up for a while I normally leave my up for at least 7 days just to make sure that all clients remap to the new server. You may also want to look around the Knowledge Base articles to ways to migrate to a new server especially if your old server is the first server in the site.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;152959

If anyone calls and says "I know a little something about computers" just tell them to reformat it.

 

[eod]

Since the crash I've been manually backing up the priv and pub by shutting it down each night. Backing it up. Then starting it up again.

I would indeed backup before attempting to move to the new server.

 

[DestinysDream]

Have you mounted the backups and verify they are good?

If anyone calls and says "I know a little something about computers" just tell them to reformat it.

 

[eod]

As in just copying the priv and pub back into the mdbdata folder and starting it back up? I haven't tested any this week at all. I will test em and make sure.

I'm still curious about chances of moving over actual corruption from the old server store to the new store.

 

[DestinysDream]

I doubt you have any corruption since you did get the services to start and you seem to have resolved all of the major issues. If I was you I would not be concerned.

If anyone calls and says "I know a little something about computers" just tell them to reformat it.

 

[zbnet]

Actually, eod, yoiu might still have store corruption. An online backup will recalculate the checksum on every 4KB page within your store, and if it finds even a single one that is different to the stored value, you have database corruption. By switching to offline backups, you're not doing this critical nightly check of the database. Also, you're not purging down your transaction logs (which an online backup will do automatically), which means you might run out of disk space - which is a bad idea.

 

[eod]

zbnet: Thanks for the concern. I have let it run a few backups since then via backup exec, it is just such a pain to get them off when I need them that I wanted to be a little more hands on with my method. This is only until I migrate over to the new server, so it isn't like I plan to let it go like this forever.

I will let backup exec run tonight just to check for any corruption.