Unable to Restore to Recovery Storage Group with non-snapshot backup

[Jim_Olding]

I am trying to restore a mailbox store to an Exchange 2003 server.  I have setup a recovery storage group, added the DB to recover to it, and setup the restore job in BackupExec.  The restore job fails with the error 0xe000ff00, saying that the DB is already mounted.  Everything I've read says that you can't restore to a RSG from a snapshot backup, however, this backup is not a snapshot.  Does anyone have any reccomendations?

[CraigV]

Have you tried to stage your restore to disk? It should then restore all your Exchange files (logs...some of them, *.edb etc). From there, stop Exchange and copy the files to the locations you've installed Exchange too, and try a disaster recovery of Exchange.
We did it that way for a server in Africa and it worked well. You have to do the Exchange disaster recovery installation as far as I know.

[Jim_Olding]

I will give that a try right now and let you know how it goes.

[Jim_Olding · Accepted solution]

Did not work.  I ended up with a bunch of backup to disk files in the staging folder, no option to restore individual messages.  I followed the staging guide you've posted in a couple other threads.  When the full backup set was created, the GRT option was not enabled for Exchange.

I think I'm going to have to setup a parallel DR environment, do a restore of my AD and Exchange server, and then ExMerge the data out of there.  I just wish that I could restore to the Recovery Storage Group and avoid all of that.