Strategies to Repair Exchange 2007 Database After Dirty Shutdown

Introduction

The Exchange Server 2007 database is built on Microsoft Joint Engine Technology (JET) Blue engine technology, which is also known as Extensible Storage Engine. The fundamental feature of this engine is to provide crash recovery mechanism for maintaining the data consistency, in occurrence of system crash event. It intelligently performs the caching procedure for ensuring high performance of accessing data. Here, you will come to know the way to repair Exchange 2007 database after dirty shutdown.

What is Dirty Shutdown?

The JET Blue engine marks the database pages as DIRTY, until the database updation procedure is not complete. The situation is termed as Dirty Shutdown (an inconsistent state), when system abnormally shuts down and because of which it interrupts transaction process to perform commit action to the database.

Errors Caused Due to Dirty Shutdown

• Error 550

“Operation terminated with error -550 JET_errDatabaseDirtyShutdown, Database was not shutdown cleanly. Recovery must be run to properly complete database operations for the previous shutdown.”

• Error 528

“Exchange is unable to mount the database that you specified database:0f7705584961-4a57-9008-2549f8f19116;Error Code:MapiExceptionCallfailed:Unable to mount database.(he=0X80004005,ec=-528).”

• Dirty Shutdown Error

“Database was not shutdown cleanly (dirty shutdown).”

Describing the Problem

When Exchange Server 2007 starts, it ensures whether there are any pending transactions to be written on the database or not. In the scenario when database is connected to transaction log, Exchange Server gets disconnected from it by replicating available log files.

The data consistency of Engine database depends upon the transactions that are being committed completely in the database. Moreover, such functioning is marked as atomicity and durability features of ACID property.

Therefore, to validate the current state of database go through the following procedure:

Open Command Prompt on your machine

Write below-mentioned cmdlet for checking current status of public folder

Now to check the current state of private folder, type the following cmdlet:

Now if the state attribute is Clean Shutdown, then it means that data is in consistent state.

If the state is Dirty Shutdown, then it refers to the inconsistent state of database.

Strategies for Fixing the Problem

Technique 1: Go For Manual Solution

There are different strategies to repair Exchange 2007 database after dirty shutdown according to different situations. Below-mentioned are the techniques explained for handling the problem in different situations:

Situation 1: Clean State of LOG Files

By performing soft recovery of database, you can resolve the problem. When it is re-mounted during an unexpected termination, the transaction log files are replicated. Moreover, it can be performed by making use of Exchange Storage Engine Utility. We can perform the repair operation, integrity check, and other operations on Exchange when you are offline.

NOTE: Before performing soft recovery, make sure that the log files are not damaged and to examine this, write “Eseutil/ml”Path of the log files\log prefix” in command prompt.

Soft Recovery Syntax

Situation 2: Transaction LOG Files Missing

When LOG files are not in a clean state, then hard recovery of database is required to fix the error. It is identical to soft recovery database but in this case, the transaction LOG files are being replicated by recovering database from online backup.

• If backup is present, then restore EDB and STM database files & when restoration procedure has completed, a new database will be generated named as ‘restore.env’