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MTA drive corruption - 1.May2007 11:02:07 AM

jalexander

Posts: 3
Joined: 1.May2007
Status: offline

Afternoon all,

I have a rather strange problem which is starting to cause production issues with alarming regularity - we are currently running Exchange 5.5 on Win2k (upgrading soon, but not soon enough!) My site consists of 10 mailbox servers, 2 PF servers, 2 bridgehead servers, 2 DR servers and one Exchange 2k3 server.

lately we've had quite a few issues with some (apparently random) mailbox and PF servers where the filesystem of the local drive (D:) which holds the MTA is corrupting and the drive needs re-formatting. I am seeing quite a few 270/290 events from the MTA at the moment, but nothing seems directly related to the corruption of the D; drive (FYI, Exchange is installed on C:, MTA, Binaries and pagefile on D:, databases on E: & logs on F:)

Has anyone else experienced this or have any idea as to what might be causing it? I have ruled out hardware beacause it has happened on several boxes ranging from HP DL380 G1's to G3's.

My current solution is to re-format the drive with NTFS, recreate the folders D:\exchsrvr\mtadata and copy the MTA database files from the CD back into the MTA. I then run MTACHECK.exe a couple of times and re-boot. everything works again - until it happens again on another different server - but management are getting increasingly twitchy about email outages during the week!

Any help much appreciated.....

Post #: 1

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RE: MTA drive corruption - 2.May2007 4:20:28 AM

zbnet

Posts: 815
Joined: 25.Sep.2003
From: Manchester, UK
Status: offline

Are you running the Nov 2004 post-SP4 update rollup? It's the closest thing to SP5 for Exchange 5.5, it solves quite a few issues they found with SP4. If not, you should definitely install this.

Even with that installed, there are some specific MTA hotfixes that aren't included, which might be relevant. But do the rollup first.

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=841765

Post back to update us on whether this makes any difference to the problem.

(in reply to jalexander)

Post #: 2

RE: MTA drive corruption - 2.May2007 5:06:34 AM

jalexander

Posts: 3
Joined: 1.May2007
Status: offline

We have installed the Nov'04 roll-up patch on all our servers, yes - we've also installed the KB894689 patch, the Q32966 MTA patch and the KB829418 outlook 2k3 patch!

In fairness, after previous re-builds of the MTA I hadn't re-applied these patches...

The D: drive corrupted again just now though! So I again, formatted the drive, rebuilt the MTA and then I re-applied the above patches to see if we can achieve some stability - I'll re-post if the box dies again in the next week or so - thanks for reminding me about the patches, I guess it's possible that previous MTA rebuild operations have somehow affected these hotfixes...

(in reply to zbnet)

Post #: 3

RE: MTA drive corruption - 3.May2007 3:29:28 AM

jalexander

Posts: 3
Joined: 1.May2007
Status: offline

Happened again this morning! Clearly re-applying the hotfixes etc had no affect. I've rebuilt the MTA again and this time moved the page file to the database drive - not advised I know, but I'm getting desperate here!

(in reply to jalexander)

Post #: 4