How do I mount the SCR of an Exchange 2007 Information Store?

A. If a single storage group (SG) on a server is corrupted, you would want to use database portability to mount the SCR copy of the SG and mailbox database. The first action is to dismount the source copy of the SG. You should run all the following commands from the Exchange 2007 Management Shell.

Dismount-Database savdalex01sg1mbx1 -Confirm:$False

The SCR target database now needs to be marked as mountable. The following command also reports on any data loss that would occur by mounting.

Restore-StorageGroupCopy savdalex01sg1 -StandbyMachine savdalexdr

At this point, using the procedures outlined in “How can I check on the shutdown state of an Exchange 2007 Information Store from the command line?” (InstantDoc ID 97314), you need to confirm that the database on the source server is clean. If it’s not, you need to use the instructions in “How can I fix an Information Store that has experienced a dirty shutdown in Exchange?” (InstantDoc ID 97315) to fix it.

Once the SCR target database is known to be clean, you need to mount the SG and database. Because you have no object to mount it with, you can create a dummy SG and database, then delete the created files. Doing so will leave the SG and mailbox objects intact for you to use. For speed purposes, and to avoid having to perform this procedure during an emergency failover, you might want to perform this step in advance on any SCR target servers.

New-StorageGroup -server savdalexdr -name sg1port -LogFolderPath d:sg1port -SystemFolderPath d:sg1port
New-MailboxDatabase -StorageGroup savdalexdrsg1port -Name mbx1port -EdbFilePath d:sg1portmbx1port.edb
Mount-Database mbx1port
Dismount-Database mbx1port -Confirm:$false
Del d:sg1port*.*

You can now use sg1port and mbx1port as portability objects to mount the SCR target by moving the paths of the two objects to your SCR target locations. Note the use of the ConfigurationOnly switch to update only the paths in Active Directory; no data is moved.

Move-StorageGroupPath savdalexdrsg1port -SystemFolderPath d:sg1 -LogFolderPath d:sg1 -ConfigurationOnly -Confirm:$false
Move-DatabasePath savdalexdrsg1portmbx1port -EdbFilePath d:sg1mbx1.edb -ConfigurationOnly -Confirm:false

Enter Y to the safety confirmation checks.

Set-MailboxDatabase savdalexdrsg1portmbx1port -AllowFileRestore:$true
Mount-Database mbx1port

You have now mounted the SCR copy of the database, but the mailboxes still point to the old source of the SCR, so you need to re-home the user mailboxes.