Getting an Exchange Database into a Clean Shutdown State using Eseutil

1. Check to see if your database is in a Clean State by running the following command in EMS:
Eseutil /mh "path/to/the/database.edb"

2. If it is in a clean state, simply copy all the .log files out of the exchange database directory to any location and mount the database.

So you’ve just restored an Exchange database, and now you are trying to mount it. To your surprise, you are getting an error similar to the following:

Couldn’t mount the database that you specified. Specified database: DB2; Errorcode: An Active Manager operation failed. Error: The database action failed. Error: An error occurred while trying to select a database copy for possible activation. Error: The database ‘DB2′ was not mounted because errors occurred either while validating database copies for possible activation, or while attempting to activate another copy. Detailed error(s):
An Active Manager operation failed. Error: Operation failed with message: MapiExceptionCallFailed: Unable to mount database. (hr=0×80004005, ec=-550)

Before you can mount a database restored from a backup, it needs to be in a clean shutdown state. You can use the Eseutil tool to check whether a database is in a clean shutdown state – if it is not in a clean shutdown state you can perform a repair to get the database into consistency.

Soft Recovery using Eseutil

The first thing you want to do is verify that the database is in a dirty shutdown state. We can do this using the eseutil /mh command. For example:

The output from the above command shows us that the database is dirty shutdown:

We can also see from the output, under Log Required, the database is missing a transaction log. We can replay log files into the database (as long as they exist) to get the database into consistency. To do this, we use the following syntax with eseutil:
eseutil /r /l /d
For example, my log file prefix is E02, and my database and logs are stored in G:\E_\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Mailbox\DAGDB1 . Here is a screen shot of the command:

When this repair is complete, I can run the eseutil /mh command again to verify that the database is in a clean shut down state:

At this point, I’ll be able to mount the database. This will almost always work when you restore a database from a Windows Server Backup, but there may be times when this doesn’t work and you need to perform a hard repair.

Performing a Hard Repair

Performing a hard repair using eseutil /p will check the database for any damaged pages; if it finds any, it will delete them. Make sure that you can live without any data inside the database before doing a hard repair, because you may lose data. Also, make sure you have twice as much free space as the size of the database before doing a hard repair – this is required for the temporary database that will be created.
To perform a hard repair, use the eseutil /p command, as shown here:

Once this completes, you can use the eseutil /mh command to verify the database is clean shutdown.