Exchange 5.5, Diskeeper defrag question

[mucous]

Hi,

I'm running NT 4.0 (SP6a) with Exchange 5.5.
When I run Diskeeper to defrag the hard drives on the server, the drive with all of our Exchange users is fairly heavily fragmented even after defrag is finished. I am wondering if all the fragmented files are from past users deleted from the server or something like that. I'm wondering if there's anyway to recover the many file fragments I'm seeing as diskeeper doesn't seem to be able to do much with them. As I mentioned, my theory is that the fragments are leftovers from past users. I've heard that Exchange has it's own clean up utility (esutil, or something like that)for cleaning the lost fragments. Is this right? and if so, are there any precautions I should be aware of before running it? I would really like to recover the disk space I see these files occupying.

Thanks for your advice.

 

[lardum]

Run ESEUTIL /D and then all parameters to defrag the mail database. This will free up some space for you.
Diskeeper wont help in any way regarding the exchange databases

 

[JimNelson]

I understood that defragging utilities and Exchange 5.5 is a bad mix.. Is this true?

Jim

 

[lardum]

It's not a bad mix, however it doesn't help in any way running the 3rd party defrag util

The 3rd party defrag utility wont defrag the large databases and reclaim the defragged space. ESEUTIL will do this.

 

[fuego007]

An important step to take before running the eseutil to defrag the database is to ensure you have a current backup. Also, don't expect the Diskeeper fragmentation report to change after running the eseutil. The Exchange database is a single file containing the messages of all your users.