I'll just bring everyone up to speed on my situation here.
We have a Windows 2000 Domain with Exchange 5.5 SP4 located on a Windows NT 4.0 Server SP6a.....that is....had.
Monday morning the server was experiencing signs of death, most likely virus damage or end of life hard drive as sectors and blocks became unstable and the prompts for Chkdsk were becoming more and more prevalent. Hardware was a Dell 620 Precision workstation with dual Xeon P3 733 CPUs, 256MB memory, one IDE Quantum DiamondMax 40GB hard drive, and one SCSI U-160 Atlas 10K RPM 18GB drive.
Noticing this and the impact it was having on the company's email, I decided to stop all Exchange Server services and copy the PRIV and PUB data over to another server (10GB of Info Store, something our cheapy little tape backup system couldn't handle). To our luck, we foresaw the need for an Exchange server replacement in December and purchased hardware that was just sitting there waiting to be configured.
Just FYI on the hardware: we bought a SuperMicro 6013-P8 rack mount server with dual Xeon 2.4 CPUs, 1 GB memory, and three Seagate Cheetah Ultra 320 15K RPM 18GB hard drives, sliced into three partitions running Windows 2000 Server SP4. Security settings, policies; everything had already been done....it just needed Exchange to be added. Nice timing.
At this point on Monday, after Exchange 5.5 was installed on the new server and SP4 was applied, I stopped all Exchange related services and renamed the Exchsrvr\Mdbdata directory and performed a copy/paste of Priv.edb and Pub.edb files in accordance with the Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 174197 regarding Exmerge.exe. (BTW Exmerge.exe did not work for me for whatever reason) The Priv and Pub files were placed into their "new" locations on the new server and the services were turned back on. In Exchange Administrator, what I saw was all of our information in Private Information Store under Mailbox Resources. There were no mailboxes to be found in Recipients or Server Recipients, which was to be expected according to the Microsoft article. They have no Information Store object because they've never been logged on to with this new server.
Mailboxes were built for everyone as the connection to the old server was barely up and we could still get into Exchange and see exactly what the Mailboxes were named in order to keep consistency. This server finally crashed to the point of "No operating System Detected" and "Hard Drive cannot be read" errors. Once a mailbox was created, the user's Outlook was changed to reflect the new server location, then click Check Name. Underlining the name immediately took place, indicating positive results. Outlook needs to rebuild the shortcuts, but just about everyone's Outlook comes up with all information current as of 4:49PM Monday, not bad.
Except my mailbox......and the president of the company's mailbox. Clean as a whistle, nothing there. My Outlook hangs too. Checking Task Manager reveals no process other than OUTLOOK.EXE running. According to Exchange's Mailbox Resources on the Private Information Store, I should have about 608,000K of messages/info in there. Same for the president. We get nothing except the new stuff from today.
Any Ideas as to getting that information???? MAX Points to the quickest, working fix!!
