Defragmenting Exchange Server 2000 and 2003 without enough disk space
Up until now Petri.co.il has been one of my local haunts for info on how to do certain tasks, sometimes I find he has things laid out in a certain way that aren’t always suitable for me. Generally if I’m going back for a second or third time just to get a command out of his site I want a more “concise” explanation. For those who still need to be walked through it properly I still strongly recommend him as his site contains allot of good info.
http://www.petri.co.il/defragment_exchange_2000_2003_server_databases.htm
For those who just need the nitty gritty like me, here’s the quick reference version.
Dismount your store -> Exchange System Manager -> go to DB and right click (Dismount)
Not dismounting will give this error: Operation terminated with error -550
You can find your database easily by doing a file search for priv1.edb if you are not sure.
You will do the defrag with eseutil which is in the exchange dir (again do a file search for it if you can’t find it)
Please note my Drive names are different to the default as I don’t mount my store with anything else, my log files and my store are both separate partitions from each other as well as all other windows components to keep performance up at a maximum.
F: = where my store exists
H: = where I have enough disk space to perform the defrag as you need about 130% of the store to do a defrag and i didn’t have that on the partition the store currently exists on.
F:\bin>eseutil /d “f:\mdbdata\priv1.edb” /t “h:\mdbdata\tempdfrg.edb” /f “h:\mdbdata\tempstrm.stm”
Make sure to do a full backup after this as your old backups are no longer valid, that’s why it’s best to do this whole process in a big after hours outage window. Note that it can take some time to do a defrag (approx an hour for 5gb of store)
Specify the streaming files location (if it’s not in the default with your edb)
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=254132
Error 550 when using eseutil – database still mounted
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=232301