Saving mailstore during rebuild

[jpadie]

Hello

I have exchange 2003 installed as part of small business server 2003. i have so badly screwed something up with the permissions (and the inheritance flag in IIS) that after two days of fix-attempts I am going to scrub the box and rebuild it from scratch ...

the problem is that i have several users with email accounts on the box and i need to keep their mailstores. i don't have another box handy to do a migration, regrettably.

last time I tried a backup and restore but this didn't work as the PID's were different between installation and also the win2003 installation caused the hard disk partition to have a different drive letter.

So ... Is there anyway to save the mailstore somewhere so that it can be retrieved by a fresh installation (including win server 2003)?

thanks
Justin

 

[Marcs41]

Exmerge ! 2 step method, the rest will need to be done manually.

Marc
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[jahlmer]

Consider uninstalling and reinstalling the Intranet component of SBS, rerun the Change server ip address wizard, and the connect to the internet wizard. If it still has the permissions issues, and you're going to restore... some considerations:

- copy the program files\exchsrvr\mdbdata folder to a network drive, as well as have a good tape backup if possible.. the key is dont put all eggs in 1 basket.

- reload the entire server, make sure its the win2003 for sbs at the top of the blue screen, so its the right ver.

- use the same servername, domain name, and IP address.

- i recommend dont bother restoring sys state or anything else, scratch is best for working and STABLE OS.
1. from cmd prompt, net stop msexchangeis
2. copy the current mdbdata folder to another location (just in case)
3. delete everything out of the current mdbdata folder
4. copy old mdbdata folder contents to new mdbdata folder
5. from command prompt, net start msexchangeis

If it doesnt mount, run
c:\program files\exchsrvr\bin\eseutil /p ..\mdbdata\priv1.edb

do this after deleting all files except .edb and .stm out of the MDBDATA folder.

Hope it helps, thats all I got.

 

[jahlmer]

oh yeah, and make sure you stop msexchangeis before running any commands on the DB. then upon starting it, it will usually auto-mount.