AD64 crashed - need advice for recovery

[phadobas]

Had this AD64 running for several years now.
1) I stopped the voicemail service
2) Created a full backup
3) Restarted the voicemail server
4) Tried to copy the backup file from the hard-drive to an external USB stick. The system failed to copy this file, became slow, wouldn't answer calls or store new voicemails.
5) Rebooted but the system never came up again. It went into a constant reboot - reboot-reboot...

I grabbed another computer, installed Win Server 2003, the voiceboard, and had a clean install. OK

I took the old hard-drive, attempted to clone it with Clonezilla - FAIL.
I simply mounted the corrupted HDD to a working Windows 7 machine, it showed up, I found my backup file, but copying it to my working computer kept failing. The backup file is 2.86GB in size, and every time when there was only about 200Meg left to copy, the copy process hung.

I re-installed the original, corrupt HDD to the original computer, fired it up and this time it booted. I immediately created a full backup again, and this time I was able to copy this new backup into a USB stick. I loaded this backup file into the new server, ran the RESTORE utility, and it seemingly broke my clean install: none if the original voicemail boxes showed up, and even just to restart the voicemail service takes 1 hour.

So potentially, the second backup I did was corrupt too?

Based on the above, does anybody have a good advice how to recover the lost voicemails instead of starting with a clean install?

 

[PFD45]

I have had an AD64 run slow and dbchk cleaned it up but I've never tried to bring one back from deaths doorstep like yours sounds. I can't vouch for these instructions but they came from a good source. ;-)

Note: Only a certified technician should complete the process below. Please ensure that a backup of some type exists before making changes to the customer database.

We have a procedure for dealing with the corruption issue that begins with the least invasive solution:

A) Running dbchk

1) Take the voiceserver service offline.

2) Back up all the database files.

-from the command line,
c: <enter>
md avdbackup
copy c:\vmail\*.avd c:\avdbackup
This should copy all the *.avd files to the target directory.
3) Delete the *.avk files.

cd vmail
del *.avk

4) Run dbchk.

voiceserver dbchk /f

This will show a rebuild of the database that could take as much as 10 minutes since all the *.avk files must be rebuilt. Any breaks that show "invalid" will indicate corruption that is being deleted. If these occur, run dbchk again until it comes back clean (at most 3 times).

5) Start the voiceserver service
B) Backup and Restore
1) While VM is online, do a normal ONLINE backup/

2) Shutdown VM. Restore the ONLINE backup. That will regenerate the hrec no. and realign the ctree records, and hopefully fix the corruption problem.

3) Restart VM.
C) If crashes persist, then we need to consider a rekey of the entire database. We should also update the system to version 2.5.3.5, if available, perhaps prior to this stage in troubleshooting.

 

[phadobas]

Thank you. I'll save those for future. My system just came back up. Here is what I ended up doing:
- Set up a new server, clean install as described above.
- I attached the old, corrupted HDD to a working Windows computer, and let "REKUVA" lose on it, ie I told recover all deleted and undeleted files. It took about about 20 hrs, and I managed to get the original backup file that was created right before the crash.
- I copied that onto the new server and used that to restore. Then rebooted the server
- Upon initial inspection, all voicemailboxes are there, all messages are there, all functionality appears to be working.

Thanks for looking, hopefully I will find nothing wrong in the coming days.

 

[PFD45]

Glad it worked out.

As long as yu have a current backup I think I would run dbchck a couple of times.

Or maybe just have a beer & be happy where you are.

 

[phadobas]

I prefer the dbchk. I'm not a beer kind of person