I have a customer who's SBS 2008 server decided to crash last Saturday night. Fortunately, it was the OS partition that crashed and all of the data was on a different drive. And the disk didn't actually fail - it just somehow got corrupted to the point where Server 2008 would not load. I first attempted to fix it using the bare metal restore process. This appeared to work, but after completion, the server could not find the OS on the disk, no matter how much tinkering I did with the diskpart utility.
Since I knew I had 2 good backup usb drives and a good on-line backup, I decided to go ahead and re-install the OS and then restore AD from the backup. Unfortunately, this is their only server and there was not another domain controller to recover the domain info from. So I restored the OS with no problem and then attempted to do the recovery from the usb drive. This is where things got ugly.
I was able to import the catalog from the usb drives using the wbadmin utility. But after loading the catalog, the server backup would not restore from the disk. It would see the backup date, but when I tried to restore from any listed date, I got this:
So I went ahead and booted into DS recovery mode, hoping that it would work with the command line in wbadmin. It would not. I could run the wbadmin get versions utility and see the list of backups all day long, but when I ran wbadmin startsystemstaterecory, I could not get it to work to save my life. At this point, it was about 9 p.m.. With the customer's permission (and $500 of his money), we made the decision to call Microsoft and try to get some help. The guy I talked to essentially went through all the same steps I had already done and then told me I should try a bare metal restore because he couldn't get it to work either. Well I sure as heck was not going to start another bare metal restore at midnight. So we re-created all the user names, rejoined the machines to the new domain, etc. etc. We were there until after 3 AM. But we got it all put back together except for 1 guy's email. His outlook would not open under the old user profile to do an export to pst.
So this is where I stand right now - all is good with the folks in that office except for the one guy's old email. There is not an ost file on his old profile, so I am guessing that somehow, he was not working in cached exchange mode. I have downloaded a trial version of one of those edb to pst converters and it sees thousands of messages in his mailbox, but won't convert them without ponying up $400.
I have re-created their old server on a VM at my house in the hope that I can somehow figure out a way to get windows to read the backup off of that usb drive. If I can do that, I hope that I can restore their old AD onto the VM, then somehow log into his old email account and dump it out to a pst. So far, I am getting the same errors on the VM that I got on the live machine.
I know this is a mouthful, but I hope I have explained myself well enough that someone might have some ideas about restoring this backup.
Thanks.
Mike