Information Store Corruption due to RAID Issues

One of the common reasons for Exchange Information Store to get corrupt is hardware issues. Thus when you identify server consolidation for Exchange Server computer, experts suggest you to adhere to Windows Server Catalog tips. The most important is a reliable storage subsystem and that's the reason you are often recommended to use Redundant Array of independent Disk (RAID) configuration. This not only increases performance by allowing multiple I/O operations but also adds to reliability. But unfortunately there can still be instances that may bring corruption to message store. If one or more of RAID components fail, the Exchange Information Store can catch corruption. In such situation, you need an Exchange Recovery solution to repair the database and recover the lost data.

Consider you use a RAID 2 system to run Exchange Server. All the Information store data including the log files are stored on the same drive. You observe that one of the RAID drives shows typical corruption issues. So you replace the drive, but you experience similar kind of problems with other drives as well.

Later, you notice that you cannot mount the Information Store. When you run eseutil /mh command to check the integrity of the database, it shows that Information store is corrupted. The database files and log files (typically, e00.log file) are damaged.

Cause

Since disk issues are repeatedly observed, it indicates issues with the RAID controller that has ultimately corrupted the Information Store database files.

Solution

You need the following solutions to deal with such problems:

1. Run eseutil /p command to repair the corrupted database. Keep in mind that this can delete the corrupted pages, so to prevent against critical data loss, it is recommended to use the command on a database backup.
2. Restore from a valid backup. But it is likely that database backup may also not exist in usable state. The reason is that the corruption problems have been continuous for considerable time and it is possible that you might have backed up the corrupted Information Store.
   
3. Use a third-party Exchange Recovery utility. The Exchange Server Recovery software can scan and then repair the corrupted Exchange database using powerful, yet safe, algorithms.

Exchange Server Recovery Software is a reliable tool that repairs corrupted Exchange database and extracts mailboxes as *.pst files while keeping the original database unaffected. The Exchange Recovery Tool supports MS Exchange Server 2007, 2003, 2000, and 5.5. The tool can also recover deleted mailboxes.