Last Friday, one of our Exchange 2000 servers had a meltdown. Apparently
there was some corruption brewing in the storage group but it never
triggered any warnings or errors in the event log. Finally on Friday, the
server started acting up, refusing connections. Thenit only got worse.
Information Store service refused to stop for really long time, we had to
restart the server. It seemed like everything came up OK and all the stores
mounted. Then a few hours later all the stores dismounted by themselves, at
least that's what my colleague is telling me.
Anyway, the stores were down in a dirty shutdown state and would not mount.
I did not run eseutil /p (that's my last resort). Eseutil /g showed a lot of
inconsistencies. Eseutil /d crapped out.
So I figured, I had a good full backup from previous Friday and good
incremental backups from all subsequent days. It would be simpler and safer
to restore everything from those backups. Done that many times before
without any problems.
So I saved all the transaction logs from that Friday to a safe location. And
started the restore... Dang! forgot to copy the EDB and STM files to a safe
location beforehand... but it was really late and I was not thinking
straight.
Anyway the restore completed without visible problems, the full, the
incrementals, "Last Backup Set" checked on the last incremental...
All of a sudden it tells me that a restored transaction log is corrupted,
bad checksum, can't play forward. And that transaction log is #2 in the
sequence.
I ended up cutting off all the restored TLs and bringing up just the
Information Store databases. And everyone lost a week worth of mail.
So I figured I would take the issue offline, to an alternate server and do
an offline restore there and sort out issue with the TLs there. And then I
would ExMerge everyone's missing data and import it into production. Done
that before.
I have been fiddling with this for a few days now. Called MS PSS. Basically
they say sorry, once you have a corrupted log you are a toast past that
point.
To me it seems that there must be a way to cut the losses and repair a
corrupted log. Or fake that it is OK. But MS says there is no such way. I
don't care if I lose a few messages if I could get back a week's worth of
mail.
So here is my question - does anyone know how to hack a corrupted TL so that
it would look normal?
Thanks in advance
Andrey Fyodorov
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