Exchange Server follows transaction logging system. Information Store folder is comprised of related transaction logs along with storage groups. It means that Information Store is the most critical part of Exchange Server. Number of storage groups may vary according to the requirements of organizations and Exchange Server version being used. If the Information Store suffers inconsistencies or corruption, EDB Recovery will recover lost data in the absence of online backup.
Priv.edb and Pub.edb are two critical files of Exchange Server Storage Group. These files contain user mailboxes. If these files get corrupt, Exchange Server may return 4294966095 error and Information Store service may fail to start. The corresponding event entry in Event Viewer is -1201.
Apart from EDB corruption, -1201 Event ID may also generate if log files and EDB files are on different drives and due to some issues, log files are not available. To resolve the issue, user can follow these steps:
If online data backup is available, user can restore Information Store from it
If Information Store backup is unavailable or incomplete, user needs to use Eseutil repair utility to perform Hard Recovery. The process requires two basic considerations: backing up Mdbdata folder to avoid further data loss and ensuring that hard disk contains sufficient free space for Hard Recovery. Mdbdata folder contains all log files and storage groups of Exchange Server. However Exchange Server Repair requires following commands to be applied:
eseutil /p /ispriv /tx:\tempdfg.edb
eseutil /d /ispriv /tx:\tempdfg.edb
isinteg -fix -priv -test alltests
eseutil /p /ispub /tx:\tempdfg.edb
eseutil /d /ispub /tx:\tempdfg.edb
isinteg -fix -pub -test alltests
If problem persists, third party Exchange Server Recovery applications can be used on Mdbdata folder to repair damaged EDB files. These are the tools that can scan and repair damaged EDB files and extract user mailboxes without affecting data integrity.
Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery is the most powerful edb recovery software. It extracts user mailboxes from damaged EDB files and restores them as individual PST files which can be used with Outlook. It supports Exchange Server 2003, 2000 and 5.5. It is compatible with Windows XP, 2003 and 2000.
Exchange Server 5.5
where x: is the drive containing the required free disk space.
NOTE: When the Information Store service has started, after the repair process, make a full online backup immediately.
