An Exchange 2000 Disaster Recovery

Recovering from a database corruption in Exchange Server 5.5 isn't a simple task. Exchange Server 5.5 administrators have accumulated years of experience in building disaster-recovery plans. Tools such as Microsoft's excellent disaster-recovery white paper (http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/disaster.htm) explain the steps that you need to take when hardware corruption strikes.

Exchange 2000 Server introduces a more complex database environment to master. In Exchange 2000 Enterprise Server, you can partition the Store across up to four storage groups (SGs), each of which can support up to five mailbox or public databases. In addition, Active Directory (AD) has replaced the Exchange Directory database, so you must revisit directory-restore procedures in case problems occur on servers acting as a domain controller (DC) or Global Catalog (GC). Dealing with an AD failure deserves separate consideration.

My group's Exchange 2000 server recently had a hardware failure that resulted in a corrupt mailbox store. I hope that the experience I gained in diagnosing, understanding, and dealing with the corruption is helpful to anyone who has to prepare a disaster-recovery plan for Exchange 2000. . . .