Does IDR support Exchange 2003?

[Dan_Mashal]

I was able to successfully recover a domain controller in Backup Exec with no problems. However I tried to do it last night with our Exchange server and after IDR restored all the files Windows 2003 boots up and shows a logo of the IDR screen with a grey background but it just stays at that screen and does nothing. I did an automated restore with removable media attached to the media server. I was able to successfully recover a domain controller using this method.

Is Exchange not supported by IDR?

[ARCHI]

I had a similar problem. Unfortunately, I did not receive necessary support and I could not even start a server. I had most to edit (reconfigure) MBR, boot.ini, set partition active, etc. Probably, there are problems in use IDR on servers with Exchange 2003 installed on.

[Dan_Mashal]

Does this mean now that I have to do a manual ASR restore and install Exchange in Disaster Recovery mode?

[Dan_Mashal]

Just in case anyone was wondering I ended up doing an OS install from scratch and restored the DB's since IDR wouldnt work.

[Hywel_Mallett]

The theory is that restoration of the Exchange databases isn't supported by IDR, but the server itself is. Restore the server using IDR, then restore the Exchange information store, using the Exchange agent.
I haven't used IDR myself. I know that there used to be some disquiet about it, though that seems to have died down recently.
To do a disaster recovery of an Exchange server, you don't need to install Exchange in disaster recovery mode, provided you've backed the server up properly. Instead, restore the server the normal way (install Windows, install the remote agent, restore all drives, system state and shadow copy components, reboot). Then the server will start up, though Exchange has no information store data yet, so set the information store to be overwriteable, then restore it from backup using BE.
I've performed this procedure many times, and can confirm that it works!

[Dan_Mashal]

Thanks for the reply. Now I dont remember the IDR process step by step but how would you chose to restore only the Windows server and not the exchange data?

[Hywel_Mallett]

As I say, I've not used IDR, but my understanding is that you don't get a choice not to restore Exchange data, because IDR can't restore it. If you do the IDR process, you should have Exchange, but with no information store. You then need to restore that in the normal way.