Restoring mailboxes from MBDDATA

[unHookt]

I lost a drive and had to rebuild an Exchange server from scratch recently. I salvaged the MDBDATA from another unaffected drive on the server. Can I restore the mail from my users' accounts using only the contents of the MDBDATA directory? If so, what would the procedure be for this?

Thanks in advance.

 

[unHookt]

Anyone?

 

[MalcolmS]

Did you restore system state from backup? Do you also have transaction logs?

 

[unHookt]

I have not tried restoring system state - had no backup, only the MDBDATA directory which resided on another drive. If by log files you mean those txt documents "E00*" - yes I have those.

I tried stopping both stores and replacing the existing files in the new MBDDATA directories with what was in the previous MDBDATA directories and the stores won't restart.

 

[MalcolmS]

The restore procedure requires rebuilding Win2k, configuring the same drives and directories as existed on the original build. Next, restore system state from most recent backup which adds the server back to the domain using the same SID that was assigned to the original server. Next, install exchange with the "/DisasterRecovery" switch on the install command line. The exchange components must be the same as originally installed and must be on the same drives.

You can try running exchange install again using the disaster recovery option but I doubt that it will work.

Assuming the data in the mailboxes is mission critical, I'd get your boss to appoved the $280 or so dollars to call Microsoft Support. I suspect the outcome will be that your company will budget you enough dollars to purchase effective backup software and hardware to prevent future data lost.