Thursday, May 10, 2007

Recovering a failed Exchange 2007 server!

Monday morning I came into work to find that I could not get Microsoft Outlook to play with our Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 as it had on Friday afternoon when I left for the week. As it turns out the RAID controller decieded it didn't want to see two of the hard disks. Result: Rebuild RAID array, format and reinstall Windows.

After I got Microsoft Windows Server 2003 R2 reinstalled and fully updated I had to reinstall Exchange. This being my first time recovering a failed server I was a bit nervious to say the least. I tried to just run Setup.exe but it said "Exchange is in an inconsistent state" or something very similar. So I opened up a command prompt and ran "setup /?". After reading through the help file I saw the holy grail of commands. "Setup /mode:RecoverServer" will do just that. Recover your server (Installed and configured as it had been.) Too bad our backups of the mail stores where bad otherwise I could have had everything back up and running within a matter of hours.

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