How to Repair Corrupt 2019 Exchange Mailboxes and Database

Byvarsha

Microsoft Exchange Server allows uninterrupted email communication for enterprises, thus contributing to their growth. Nevertheless, you cannot rule out the possibility of a corrupted Exchange database and whenever it happens, the corporate communication goes to a standstill.

Reasons behind corrupt Exchange database

 Many reasons may account for the problems occurring in the Exchange database, such as:

  • Abrupt system shutdown 
  • Power loss
  • Malware infection
  • Virus attack
  • Database object missing
  • User errors
  • Hardware related issues

Methods for Exchange Mailboxes & Database Repair

To repair the corrupted 2019 Exchange mailboxes and database, you can try two common methods:

  • Using New-MailboxRepairRequest Command, or- This is to repair corrupt mailboxes
  • Exchange database repair through Eseutil – This is to repair complete database.

If both these methods do not work, leveraging an Exchange EDB recovery tool such as Stellar Repair for Exchange can prove effective. Let’s know about these methods in detail right here.

New-MailboxRepairRequest Command

Using the New-MailboxRepairRequest cmdlet will help you to diagnose the reason behind the damaged Exchange mailbox and perform the Exchange mailbox recovery accordingly. This PowerShell command is available only for selected Exchange Servers, including 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019. 

Since, we are talking about recovering the corrupted 2019 Exchange mailbox, running this through command using the Exchange Management Shell (EMS) will work for us.

  1. The syntax to detect and fix the corruption issue in a single mailbox:

New-MailboxRepairRequest

   [-Mailbox] <MailboxIdParameter>

   -CorruptionType <MailboxStoreCorruptionType[]>

   [-Archive]

   [-Confirm]

   [-DetectOnly]

   [-DomainController <Fqdn>]

   [-Force]

   [-WhatIf]

   [<CommonParameters>]

For example:

New-MailboxRepairRequest -Mailbox ABC -CorruptionType ProvisionedFolder,SearchFolder,AggregateCounts,Folderview –Archive

This example finds and repairs all types of corruptions in the ABC mailbox and archive.

  1. The syntax to detect and fix the corruption issues in all the mailboxes 

New-MailboxRepairRequest

   [-Database] <DatabaseIdParameter>

   -CorruptionType <MailboxStoreCorruptionType[]>

   [[-StoreMailbox] <StoreMailboxIdParameter>]

   [-Confirm]

   [-DetectOnly]

   [-DomainController <Fqdn>]

   [-Force]

   [-WhatIf]

   [<CommonParameters>]

For example: 

New-MailboxRepairRequest -Database EMS-DB001 -CorruptionType AggregateCounts

This example finds and repairs AggregateCounts for mailboxes contained in the mailbox database EMS-DB001.

After using this New-MailboxRepairRequest command to perform Exchange mailbox recovery,  you can proceed to know the status of your command and find out if it has fixed the corrupted Exchange mailboxes. For this, you will need to run Get-MailboxRepairRequest PowerShell command.

Using Eseutil for Exchange database repair and recovery  

Exchange Server Database Utility or ESEUTIL is the Exchange database repair tool from Microsoft to perform Exchange EDB recovery tasks. It is available for the Microsoft Exchange 2007 and beyond including Microsoft Exchange 2019.

It is a common method to repair corrupted EDB files. But you should be aware that this command deletes the EDB file records. Therefore, you need to be careful while using this Exchange EDB recovery tool. A better move will be to create a backup of your Exchange database file before proceeding. Here are the repair steps:

  1. Backup your EDB database
  2. Use Eseutil /r to perform the soft recovery of the database.
  3. If the soft recovery does not work, use Eseutil /P command to perform the hard recovery of the EDB database: eseutil /p
  4. Next, run Eseutil/d command to defrag  Exchange database
  5. check database integrity by running the command Eseutil/mh

Use Stellar Repair for Exchange software

At times, ESEUTIL repair may fail to work because of too many delays, irreparable database damage, permanent deletion of log records, etc. To overcome these limitations, using an Exchange EDB recovery tool is a better option. Stellar Repair for Exchange is widely recommended software in this context. Numerous factors make this software the foremost choice of database administrators:

  • Easy to use GUI interface
  • Robust algorithms for database scanning, and 
  • Ability to recover deleted mailboxes and emails 
  • Facility to repair corrupted mailboxes in all the Exchange versions from 5.5 to 2019
  • Restoration of the recovered mailbox items into a new personal storage table (PST) file
  • Facility to recover Unicode EDB files in the latest 2019 Exchange database
  • Save the recovered file in multiple formats like RTF, HTML, MSG, EML, and PDF
  • Directly export recovered database to Live Exchange or Office 365

Steps to repair corrupted EDB file

Here are the steps for Exchange database repair with the help of Stellar Repair for Exchange

  1. Download the software from official website
  2. Install the tool and launch it.
  3. On the home screen, click browse
  4. Choose the corrupt EDB file that you want to repair and click Next.

5. In the resulting dialog box of ‘Select Scan Mode’, Click the Quick Scan option for faster scan and then click ‘OK’.

6. or If the file is severely corrupt, Run Extensive Scan to repair the file. Extensive Scan will take comparably more time but will fetch enhanced results.

7. Selecting the Extensive Scan option will start scanning the EDB file for corrupted mailboxes.

8. After the scan finishes, the Exchange EDB recovery tool will show a preview of all the mailboxes contained in the corrupt EDB file.                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

  1. From the preview, choose one or more mailboxes to proceed with Exchange database recovery and click save.
  2. Select the format in which you want to save the repaired and recovered mailbox, e.g., PST, etc.
  3. Choose the location where you want to save the file. 
  4. Click OK to finish the recovery process.

This will carry out the Exchange database recovery with the help of Stellar Repair for Exchange Software.

Wrapping up

Your mailbox in the 2019 Exchange Server and database may go corrupt due to several reasons. In most cases, ESEUTIL or the PowerShell command MailboxRepairRequest can perform the required Exchange recovery. 

If the file is severely corrupt and these methods fail to recover its data, using an Exchange EDB recovery tool such as Stellar Repair for Exchange Software will be an ideal option. 

The software can repair extensively corrupt Exchange mailboxes and recover the contained data. To download the software you can refer to the official website of Stellar or simply download it.

 

 

 

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