A dirty shutdown in Microsoft Exchange Server generally leaves your Information Store in inconsistent state. This occurs when the Information Store(s) have not been closed properly, generally because of power outage or power surges. In most of such cases, you cannot mount the EDB databases. The dirty shutdown doesn’t always indicate the database corruption, but the fact that the database files have not been detached from the log files’ stream in a proper fashion. The automatic recovery procedure starts the next time when you start the Exchange Server. But if the procedure fails, you need to recover the database files manually. This can be done either by using Exchange Server built-in repair utilities or with the aid of Exchange Repair tools.

For example, consider a situation when you experience dirty shutdown with your Exchange Server. The next time when you start the server, it displays the following error:

“JET_errDatabaseCorruptedNoRepair -1224”

The database might be inaccessible.

Cause

The error indicates that the database is corrupted but for some reasons, repair is not allowed.

Solution

You can try implementing the following measures to solve the given problem:

  1. Check if an online backup is available that can be used to restore the database.

  2. If no backup is present, you can repair the database manually using eseutil tool as follows:

a) Run eseutil /mh command to check the database file header

b) If the above command reports ‘Dirty Shutdown’ state, make sure that all the present transaction log files from the checkpoint forward are present. If not, you can run eseutil /p, command to make the database consistent.

c) After this, you should run eseutil /d command to defragment the database. This discards and later rebuilds the indexes and space of the Exchange databases.

Running eseutil /p command can cause catastrophic data loss, so you are suggested to opt for safer database recovery solutions. There are several EDB Repair Software available that use effective and safe scanning algorithms to analyze and repair corrupted Exchange databases. The MS Exchange Repair applications are easy to install and use with no prior requirement of having any technical knowledge.

This Exchange Repair Software is a powerful and user-friendly tool that repairs corrupted Exchange Server databases and extracts the mailboxes in individual *.pst files. The Exchange Server Repair Software supports MS Exchange Server 5.5, 2000, and 2003. It is a feature-rich utility that is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2003, and 2000.