Exchange recoveries don’t come up very often these days (for me at least), with exchange 2010 and win 2008R2 being so solid… and virtualisation… the loss of server hardware or corruption of the OS is just becoming less and less common.

Anyhoo – a client had a SAN disk die – and for reasons which I didn’t delve too deeply into, apparently the RAID5 didn’t work and they lost one vdisk…. (yes, it sounds suss to me too…. this was a EVA4400… so not a cheap SAN)  this vdisk happened to have the exchange OS partition on it…. but the database and log disks were fine….

So, we built up a server with the same name as the old one, gave it the same IP and joined it the domain…. the connected the logs and database drives to the newly built server.

Using ADSIEdit, I then looked up the path to the database, as the client could not remember which drive had which letter – if your in this situation, fire up ADSIEdit and connect to the configuration partition, then navigate to CN=DatabaseName,CN=Databases,CN=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT),CN=Administrative Groups,CN=ORGNAME,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=blah,DC=au

have a look at the properties msExchEDBFile and msExchESEParamLogFilePath…. this will help you allocate the drive letters correctly should you run into a site that doesn’t know this or have it documented.

Next issue – versioning…. the client wasn’t sure which Service Pack version exchange 2010 was at, but though it was SP2.

I grabbed the SP2 media and after installing the pre-reqs, ran setup /mode:RecoverServer

First error came up for the CAS and HT roles…. must install a version of 14.1.218.5 or later….. that number relates to Exchange 2010 SP1 RTM…. funny, SP2 is later than SP1… but oh well…. SP1 it is….

So I grabbed the SP1 media and re-ran the setup command…. and proceeded to get

[ERROR] The internal transport certificate for the local server was damaged or missing in Active Directory. The problem has been fixed. However, if you have existing Edge Subscriptions, you must subscribe all Edge Transport servers again by using the New-EdgeSubscription cmdlet in the Shell

because there is not another exchange server within this environment, I cant simply remove the edge transport from the GUI… so I went searching in ADSIEdit to

CN=HTServer,CN=Servers,CN=Exchange Administrative Group (FYDIBOHF23SPDLT),CN=Administrative Groups,CN=ORGNAME,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=blah,DC=au

Go to the properties of the HTserver container and the properties of the property “msExchEdgeSyncCredential” – remove the 3 entries.

Try the recovery again, and get

     A Setup failure previously occurred while installing the HubTransport role.

Either run Setup again for just this role, or remove the role using Control Panel.

Awesome…. try to uninstall via control panel, no go, try to uninstall via command line, no go…. so, the solution:

• Open up regedit
• Navigate to HKLMSoftwareMicrosoftExchangeServerV14
• Delete the “Action” and “watermark” keys

Now re-run the install – all is good…. yay!

Next up, re-allocate the certificates on the server, re-associate the edge transport – and test (and then upgrade to SP2 RU5v2 as of time of writing!)

All in all, the recovery procedure is still good, but complicated a bit by the edge transport being present (im not a fan of edge transports…. use a HT with forefront for exchange with port 25 published via TMG instead….. or if you prefer, an ironport)