NT4 Exchange 5.5 missing dir.edb

[Paullyons]

Hi,

We are running exchange 5.5 on NT4. It looked like Tuesday afternoon email stopped arriving I came in Wednesday morning and could access mailboxes via outlook but no mail. So just did a simple reboot as couldn't see anything in logs untoward.

Then Exchange just never came back up, I narrowed it down to the dir.edb and couldn't find it so it got deleted somehow??? The only AV running was Norton for Exchange.

The Priv and Pub stores look fine and consistant, how do I get the dir.edb back???

I have found a copy of dir.edb (not sure how good) but it just won't start Directory Service

In a bit of a mess so any help greatly recieved!!

Thanks
Paul

 

[zbnet]

dir.edb is pretty critical to Exchange. But don't worry, it's on your last online backup. You are running online backups, aren't you?

 

[Paullyons]

Hmm yes that is the big problem, no online backups. Will make sure that never happens again. The only copy of dir.edb also seems to be corrupt?

What do you suggest?

 

[zbnet]

That's the problem with insurance - everyone realises the need for it the morning after the disaster. I can't really believe, though, that you could be in a situation where you running a full production email server, even to the extent that you're running AV on it, and you don't have a single backup of the server.

dir.edb is totally critical to the identity of the Exchange server. Without it you are totally screwed. See

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;184186

- you can try the repair tools on dir.edb for nothing (eseutil), but if not you're in a full DR situation.

Basically, if you need to go down the DR path, you're looking at backing up the current databases, then rebuilding the server as a new install (exactly the same directory and site name - this builds a new dir.edb), then restoring the databases onto the new server. A DS/IS consistency check will then populate the DIR with stub mailboxes from the store - you can save all the extra mailbox directory data before you trash the old server with a directory export, and then import it into the new server at the end if you want to keep all the extra data. You'll need the 5.5 DR whitepaper to help do all this (

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/55/support/exdisrec.mspx).

 

[Paullyons]

Thanks for your help.

Yes stupid I know but we never seem to practice what we preach, but that will be changing!

Have tried eseutil on dir.edb but no joy, so looks like DR it is then.

Cheers,
Paul

 

[Zelandakh]

Paul, I've not tried this on 5.5 but the theory is sound:

EXmerge the lot out. Bin the priv, logs and dir. Stop and restart the Exchange services and this should create a blank database. Sort out the user to mailbox links, exmerge the mails back in and you are away.

I've not played with Exchange 5.5 for about 4 years, but Ex2k would do it fine!