Microsoft Exchange - Mail Store will not mount

Let me start this post by saying I am a complete NOOB when it comes to Microsoft Exchange.  I should also say I hate strongly dislike MS Exchange.  From an Administrative side it is so unintuitive. I am spoiled rotten by the MDaemon Mail Server; so much easier to troubleshoot issues.

One of my clients contacted me today because their email wasn't working.  The server had randomly rebooted overnight and now they cannot send or receive mail and they are getting errors when connecting via Outlook.

While looking through error logs and troubleshooting this issue, here are some of the messages I received:

• Mail store is not available
• exchange store is not mounted
• database files in this store are corrupted

Guess I should also mention this is on a Windows Server 2003 for Small Business Server SP2.

How do you mount the Mail Store?

OK, so how the heck do you mount the mail store? As I said, I'm new at this.

Open System Manager

• Click on START
• All Programs
• Microsoft Exchange
• System Manager

Expand the tree

• Go to Servers
• The name of your server
• First Storage Group

Right-click on the mail store(s) and choose Mount Store

It will not mount - says it is corrupted

In my case both the Mailbox Store and the Public Folder Store were off-line and when I tried to mount them I would get an obscure error.  Turns out both of these stores were corrupted.

I was finally able to fix it with the following command lines.  First of all open a CMD prompt and CD to this directory:  C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\bin

Then execute this command:
eseutil /p "C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\priv1.edb"  - This is the Mailbox Store

and then execute this command:
eseutil /p "C:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\MDBDATA\pub1.edb"  - This is the Public Folder Store

After using the above commands I was able to mount the mail stores from the System Manager (above).  I also read several people saying, Oh be careful with the /p (recovery) as it could cause issues.  Instead try the /r (repair) option; but in my case the /r did no good at all.

Please also refer to these two documents:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/182903
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/327156

 As always, hoping this helps someone else.  It'll probably be me, because I'll probably forget.