Soft recovery of Exchange 2003 database

A step by step walk-through of procedure to be followed when exchange database fail to mount in Exchange System Manager. Please note that I have personally tried these steps with MS premier support executive on call, however I take no guarantee that

1. Ensure that Exchange System Attendant and Exchange Information Store service are started.
2. Now try to mount the database and if database is not mounting and giving an error then check the shutdown state of the database.
3. To check whether database are in clean shutdown or dirty shutdown. Run the below command from the “Exchsrv\bin” directory:

Eseutil /mh “Path of the database” as indicated below and check the state of the database for e.g. :

Eseutil /mh “K:\EXCHANGE20-SG01-DB\EXCHANGE20-SG01-MBX01.edb”




4. Check if the database is in dirty shutdown state. If yes then also check for the “Log required” field as shown above and make sure you have those log files for soft recovery.

5. To check how many logs files have been committed to the database RUN Eseutil /mk “path of the checkpoint file”

Eseutil /mk “L:\EXCHANGE20-SG01-LOGS\E00.chk”

The result of the above command and the logs required as per /mh may not match of the chk file is corrupt. The more reliable output is from /mh

6. To make sure that all the log files are consistent, run
Eseutil /ml “Path of the log files\log prefix” as indicated below.
Eseutil /ml “L:\EXCHANGE20-SG01-LOGS\E00”

Below command will help you check the health of all the log files in the location. Be careful that this command will take VERY long time to complete if you have too many files in the log folder.

A better option is to move the committed log files to a backup folder and then run the above command on the remaining log files to check the consistency of uncommitted log files.





7. You may not see the last log file required in the log folder because that log file may be E00.log. You can find the actual log file name of e00.log “Eseutil /ml “Path of Log File\e00.log”

8. Make sure that you have all the logs files in sequence and are in consistent state which have not yet been committed and if any log file is missing or corrupted then soft recovery will not be successful.

9. To run the soft recovery run the command “Eseutil /r Enn /L “Path of the log files” /d “path of database file”.

E.g. Eseutil /r E00 /l “L:\EXCHANGE20-SG01-LOGS” /d “K:\EXCHANGE20-SG01-DB\EXCHANGE20-SG01-MBX01.edb”






If the above command fails, you can include the switch “/s” for giving the location of the “.chk” file.

Another switch /i can be appended to the above command to ignore the other databases that run off the same set of log files if they are mounted.

7. If the above command does not work then you can cut and paste all the committed log files and Enn.chk from the log drive in another location as backup and try mounting the database. Exchange will create a new chk file and will try to do a soft recovery itself.

If all the above steps do not succeed it is time to call Microsoft and log a SEV 1 case with them.

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Tags: Exchange Server
Published Date: 20100111