XADM: How to Recover When the Database Drive Fails

This article describes the steps to recover when the drive containing the database files for the Microsoft Exchange Server information store and/or the Exchange Server directory service fails because of hardware problems, and is unrecoverable and unreadable.

Steps for Recovery

1.	In Control Panel, double-click Services, and set the System Attendant service to disabled to prevent the service from trying to start up or being started by server monitors.
2.	Install a new drive by adding hardware to replace the failed drive.
3.	Create a logical drive with the same name as before, and format it.
4.	In the <Exchsrvr> directory, create the Mdbdata and/or Dsadata subdirectories.
5.	Enable the System Attendant, and restore from the last online backup for the information store and/or directory store.
6.	Start the Exchange Server services.

Because it is assumed that the drive containing the transaction log files is available, on startup, the service will replay through any log files generated since the last online backup, and will recover all data.

NOTE: The above steps will result in no data loss ONLY if the transaction logs were not on the failed drive containing the database files.