Exchange 2010 mbdb restore from scratch?
Hello all,
I'll make a long story short - our sole production MBDB crashed into dirty shutdown, and no combinations of eseutil would get it back up. After waiting 2 hours on eseutil /p, it crashed about 30% in to deleting files, so I decided to get everyone on a dial tone db. While there I spent a number of hours trying to get a full backup+differential into a recovery database - Backup Exec failed me here twice (over an 8 hour period), getting to very close to the end, and then 'stalling out' (the byte count stops moving, and the job rate slowly trickles down).
I decided to go into emergency mode and restore mailboxes from the full backup to the DTDB everyone is on. I'm still in the process of just moving inboxes/sent folders to people, but in the mean time I want to get my plan straight for setting our original MBDB back in place. I removed the dirty shutdown production mbdb from exchange, deleted the local files (they were taking up too much space if I wanted to start recovering people to the DTDB), so I'm left with two choices from what I can see?
1) Try to recover the Full+Differential set to a recovery database. Make a new, permanent mbdb (or can I just use the already existing DTDB?), move everyone to it, and merge what the differential provides from the recovery database. In this case, my original ruleset isn't preserved (or is it somewhere in the recovery database?) if I understand correctly.
2) Do an in place recovery of the entire original production mbdb. Is this possible? Can I tell Backup Exec to attempt to re-create the entire thing from the backup, move everyone to it, then pull all the new content from the DTDB only? If I removed the original from Exchange, will that give me trouble, or can I just make a new mbdb in the same place and then overwrite it with Backup Exec?
These are both assuming I can get a restore to take, as mentioned twice now the restore attempt has stalled out (once in place, once to a recovery database).
Sorry if my questions are rudimentary or my understanding a bit lacking, I have taken over this environment from a previous off-site admin. Thanks in advance for any help!