Exchange not working

Where do we start?  

Make sure
That all exchange services are running
That the management console works
That the Information Store is mounted

Yes all that is running
I was talking on here with a few guys yesterday and resolved nothing
I can tell you that the mail database and public folder database won't mount and there are log files missing.

And I forgot during the process yesterday it was determined that the database was in "Dirty Shutdown"

OK - what I would do then is write off the log files - you may have had all of this already.

You need to go to the command prompt and use ISINTEG to check the data store and ESEUTIL to patch it back together.

First, make a copy of the entire contents of the information stores by copying the contents of the
...Exchange Data\First Storage Group and ...Exchange Data\Second Storage Group to a backup location.  You will need a fair bit of spare disk space - 2-3 x the size of these files to cope with the rebuild.

Then open a command prompt with administrative priviledges and CD to C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Bin.

Then start looking at this page:

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/exchange-isinteg-eseutil.html

There are some slight differences with 2007 but essentially you should be able to rebuild the database, go into the system manager and remount the stores.  At that stage you should find everything works.

If you need more help, update the ticket and I'll see what I can do.

what version of exchange you have ?
what do you mean by exchange not working ? databases not mounted ?
is fo what error do you get when you try to mount a database manually from exchange console ?
are the databases still in dirty shutdown state ?

Incidentally what I meant by "write off the log files" is delete them (and the catalogdata folder) once you have taken the backup.  Leave the edb files though.  That way the utilities won't try to work with the damaged logs (they'll keep telling you there are missing ones, which you know) and will just work with the database.  You may lose a few recent emails but your priority will be to get the store back online.

I am currently restoring the system drive to get me back to before I starting tweaking things.
I will start by deleting all the log files and catalog folder and go from there

I have deleted all the log files

Get this error when running eseutil

C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\Bin>eseutil /d "D:\Exchange\Mail Data
base\Mailbox Database.edb

Extensible Storage Engine Utilities for Microsoft(R) Exchange Server
Version 08.02
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Initiating DEFRAGMENTATION mode...
            Database: D:\Exchange\Mail Database\Mailbox Database.edb




Operation terminated with error -550 (JET_errDatabaseDirtyShutdown, Database was
 not shutdown cleanly. Recovery must first be run to properly complete database
operations for the previous shutdown.) after 0.438 seconds.