Only three weeks after setting up a new SBS, we have had a major file corruption, which was a great Monday morning.
The first I heard was that only a few people were able to login and when I investigated, the server had lost it's licenses.
Looking at the Application event viewer, it starts with hundreds of 'c:\windows\ntfrs\jet\sys\edb.chk' corruption errors from source ESENT, interspersed with Sophos database errors on Sunday afternoon, through to LicenseService errors on Monday morning - 'No license was available for user...' and then MSExchangeMU errors 'Failed to access the metabase...'. There are huge numbers of other errors as well.
I found a kb article which mentions edb.chk files, so there might be something there to watch out for.
Anyway, the server then started throwing up a warning about a corrupt $Extend\$UsrJrnl folder (that's from memory, I am not in front of my notes at the moment) and said to run chkdsk. I rebooted the server into a diagnostic CD to check for hardware problems and when that passed, tried to reboot normally. It got to the Windows Server loading screen, there was a flash of blue screen of death, and the server rebooted. After hours of playing around with the Recovery Console, I eventually got it to load in safe mode and ran SP1 - the 2003 server part - and it would finally boot normally.
As it stands, users can login, access files and get email, but many things are not working right and other error messages point to corrupt files associated with the IIS. We can't, for instance, access any sharepoint services such as the company intranet.
The good news is that apart from program files, including Exchange, and datafiles being on separate partitions to the main c: drive, we have full back ups. However, there is no ASR disk.
Assuming the system stays up long enough, I will do a complete reinstall at the weekend, but I have never been in this position before and what concerns me is the active directory and mailboxes. I want to restore these during the reinstall, without playing games with pst files and new user accounts.
What can I do now to ensure that my reinstall is as straight forward as possible, without restoring potentially corrupt files?
Many thanks.
The first I heard was that only a few people were able to login and when I investigated, the server had lost it's licenses.
Looking at the Application event viewer, it starts with hundreds of 'c:\windows\ntfrs\jet\sys\edb.chk' corruption errors from source ESENT, interspersed with Sophos database errors on Sunday afternoon, through to LicenseService errors on Monday morning - 'No license was available for user...' and then MSExchangeMU errors 'Failed to access the metabase...'. There are huge numbers of other errors as well.
I found a kb article which mentions edb.chk files, so there might be something there to watch out for.
Anyway, the server then started throwing up a warning about a corrupt $Extend\$UsrJrnl folder (that's from memory, I am not in front of my notes at the moment) and said to run chkdsk. I rebooted the server into a diagnostic CD to check for hardware problems and when that passed, tried to reboot normally. It got to the Windows Server loading screen, there was a flash of blue screen of death, and the server rebooted. After hours of playing around with the Recovery Console, I eventually got it to load in safe mode and ran SP1 - the 2003 server part - and it would finally boot normally.
As it stands, users can login, access files and get email, but many things are not working right and other error messages point to corrupt files associated with the IIS. We can't, for instance, access any sharepoint services such as the company intranet.
The good news is that apart from program files, including Exchange, and datafiles being on separate partitions to the main c: drive, we have full back ups. However, there is no ASR disk.
Assuming the system stays up long enough, I will do a complete reinstall at the weekend, but I have never been in this position before and what concerns me is the active directory and mailboxes. I want to restore these during the reinstall, without playing games with pst files and new user accounts.
What can I do now to ensure that my reinstall is as straight forward as possible, without restoring potentially corrupt files?
Many thanks.
