blog.cuyler.com

The life of a sysadmin is never dull.  Last night, our Small Business Server had its usual “Patch Tuesday” slew of updates ready to go, so at 2 AM, I started the updates and rebooted the server as requested.

Upon reboot, the Exchange store wouldn’t mount.

Much teeth gnashing ensued.  I’ve recovered my fair share of Exchange stores, but this one just wasn’t coming back.

The event viewer was full of errors from the Exchange service:

Event Type:    Error
Event Source:    ESE
Event Category:    Logging/Recovery
Event ID:    494

Description:
Information Store (3860) First Storage Group: Database recovery failed with error -1216 because it encountered references to a database, ‘x:\pathtoourdatabase\priv1.edb’, which is no longer present. The database was not brought to a Clean Shutdown state before it was removed (or possibly moved or renamed). The database engine will not permit recovery to complete for this instance until the missing database is re-instated. If the database is truly no longer available and no longer required, procedures for recovering from this error are available in the Microsoft Knowledge Base or by following the “more information” link at the bottom of this message.

The frustrating part of all of this was the Exchange database was where it should have been (contrary to the above error).

Further struggle resulted in me throwing up my arms, catching a few hours sleep and attacking the problem in the morning.  I knew mail was being spooled on our mail gateway, so I wasn’t worried about losing any inbound mail.

In the morning, my luck was no better.  I did a quick Google search and turned up ExchangeRecovery.org

I made offline backups of the Exchange stores and gave them a call.  The receptionist answered promptly and transferred me over to “an Exchange specialist.”

I then spoke with Jon who was helpful as a fella could be.  I gave him access to our box and he ran thru the litany of tests I had, and then a few more too.   As a last resort, he tried moving the transaction log files out of the directory and that seemed to do the trick.  The store was in a clean state when it shutdown, so we didn’t lose any mail.

I can’t recommend Jon enough — he was good humored, professional and a joy to work with.  I give him an unqualified recommendation.