I thought today I would blog about an experience I had with Exchange Server 2007 last June 16th, 2008 we had a power outage early in the morning which resulted in server failures across the board.  This then caused a chain reaction when the backup domain controller went down. The Active Directory systems dropped off the network leaving computers requesting AD authentication dead in the water. Then our Exchange Server went offline causing an unexpected shutdown. As files are writing to the disk this can always cause corruption. In this case it did.

When the system came back online there happen everything was fine and dandy. Until we noticed that the Public Folders was offline. Now we are running an Exchange Server 2007 when I signed on this machine it would not mount. To fix this problem I had to use a PowerShell command to repair the Public Folders.

At the PowerShell command prompt I used the following command.

First run the repair command on the database, you want to repair any damage before and defragmentation because you may make the corruption irreversible.

repair eseutil /p “[Drive Root]\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange\[Location of the Database]”

Second run a defragment command, this will clean out and organize the database so it works more efficiently. I highly recommend doing a defragment after the repair this will ensure integrity and stability after the repair has complete.

defragment eseutil /d
“[Drive Root]\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange\[Location of the Database]”

Then when you remount the database in the exchange console and it should work. By reconnecting the repaired store this should automatically bring the Public Folder share back online.

– Harry Caskey