Hi all
We're recovering from an issue whereby we had multiple databases become corrupt, as a result of an underlying NTFS issue. The latter of which is still being investigated by our storage vendor. This is a guest operating system in a VMWare environment.
Originally, the affected volume housed both the Exchange installation directory, as well as the individual databases. We've since recovered the existing databases from backups, and migrated all users on to freshly created databases on different volumes, but there is still corruption present on the original / current Installation volume.
All corruption is seemingly limited to the old Databases directory - examples include duplicate files, and folders that cannot be accessed or deleted. Background drive health processes have now marked this drive as dirty, and the Action Centre is reporting that the server needs to be restarted in order to repair it.
All Exchange installation directories under Program Files -appear- to be healthy. Each night they are backed up fine, no errors reported. I can navigate them all easily as well, and Exchange has been running fine for a short while now. But my question is about the process that happens after a reboot. It's been a long, long time since I've run chkdsk, and I was just trying to get an idea of what to possibly expect. I don't mind if the obviously corrupted database directories / duplicated .edb files get deleted during this process, but am keen to preserve the exchange installation files. All other volumes are not marked as dirty.
Questions -
a) Will chkdsk log in the event viewer the exact files it it deletes? My worry is that it may delete one or two single files from the Exchange Directory, and services will no longer start, and I'll be chasing my tail trying to identify what's actually missing.
b) Worst case scenario, if multiple exchange installed program files are deleted, or all of them - what is the best course for recovery? We have good backups in place, taken nightly, as well as longer term retention before all of this even begun. Or is a reinstallation of exchange with recovery mode on the same server the best course?
Cheers!