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NoodlesWIU

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Exchange 2003 disaster recovery

Recently our organization had our mail server running Exchange 2003 crash, and everything was totally corrupted with blue screens of death.  Anyways, we decided to rebuild the machine from scratch and really test our backups.  We rebuilt it with only slight hitches here and there and we were able to work through each.

We installed Exchange 2003 in using the /disasterrecovery switch, and the same for each of the service packs.  Our last successfull backup of exchange was the 28th of January, since then our server that crashed was having issues every night with Backupexec 10.0.  But I noticed our backup of Febuary 6th had all the mailboxes!  Not the information store though.  So we decided to restore from the 6th just using the mailboxes.  So we mounted the blank mail-store, and public folder, and proceded to restore several sample mailboxes and our public folders.  It works fine for OWA, and RPC over HTTP Outlook clients, and even Outlook in non-cached mode.  But when using outlook just normally in cached mode, Outlook wont retrieve the mail , and when you hit send and receive it gives an error of 0x80040107.  I tried rebuilding the offline address list as most articles talk about to no avail.  If I dont use cached mode after the mailbox restore to get to the mail, and I export the mail, delete the mailbox, then recreate the mailbox, and import the mail, it works fine then in cached mode.  ive tested this and every restored mailbox this error happens.

My question is, can I run exchange using the /disasterrecovery switch again?  And this time just restore the "information store" from backup exec from our backup of the 28th?  what is the "information store" anyways, is it EVERYTHING, or just a portion I have to restore, and also the mailboxes later.
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isaman07
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If the cached mode is the only problem that you are facing, then i would suggest not to restore the IS as you have already found a solution for that. Don't try to get too cute, continue applying your solution even if it takes a long time.
The information store contains the databases typically your mailbox store and the public store.
But a successfull restore of an exchange server begins by restoring the IS and transaction log files, then you restore the mailboxes.All in disaster recovery mode

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125070.aspx

Harout
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NoodlesWIU

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Are the transaction logs apart of the "Information Store" if I were to reinstall exchange using the backup?  or would I have to restore the IS from backup exec, and then some additional selected files/folders, and then the individual mailboxes
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isaman07
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