Microsoft Exchange database that hosts that mailbox is offline or the mailbox doesn't exist

[edsonreis]

Hi guys,

Could you please give me a hand with the restoring issue below?

I have been trying to restore a mailbox of a user that left the bank in early May 2012 with no success. The mailbox data is in a yearly backup LTO3 tape so I got this tape and inserted it into library for LTO3 tapes to have the data restored by Backup Exec.

Well I tried to restore her mailbox with Backup Exec the way it should be executed to get data restored but no success. It always come to a message saying: Unable to restore any content for "user" because the Microsoft Exchange database that hosts that mailbox is offline or the mailbox doesn't exist.

Final error: 0xe00002fc - Cannot restore one or more mailboxes. The database that the mailboxes reside in is dismounted or is not accessible. Ensure that the server is available and that the database is mounted, and then run the job again.

Some links on internet say to recreate the user but this doesn’t make sense as the user has an unique ObjectGUID. Others say to use the LDP.exe tool to recover the deleted user to AD. I also tried other things from internet but no success as well.

Anything else I should do? Any chance of using the LTO3 tape into the library for LTO5 tapes so that I can use Netbackup instead of Backup Exec?

Please let me know if you have any thoughts about that.

Regards

[lmosla]

Hello,

What version of Exchange are you using?  Is everything (version, server) the same as it was when she left.

Make sure the Mailbox isn't hidden from the GAL.

see: http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH68938 

try a redirect restore of the mailbox as shown in this document: 

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH74537 

Make a duplicate to disk and then run the restore from the disk location.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH48668 

[edsonreis]

Hello,

Thanks in advance for your help Imosla.

I am using Exchange 2003 and everything is the same like it was when she left.

Actually the user was deleted from AD/Exchange when leaving work so no need to check out if mailbox is hidden from the GAL unless I need to recreate and inicialize the user again on AD/Exchange to restore the mailbox. Should I do that? I find the problem in recreating the user again is that each user has its own GUID and recreating again the user will have another and different GUID. Please tell me if I am wrong!!!

I already redirected the mailbox so I am restoring from \\Server1(original) to \\Server2(restore server) and I created the RSG and the same database Mailbox on Server2 as the one on the \\Server1 but even so i get that failed message.

Any other thoughts?

Cheers