Missing drive on Exchange restore.

[witt]

Hi.

I got a asked to restore a mailbox from Q3 2011, and thought this would be a walk in the park, it's not.
The restore itself went with no problems at all, but there's missing a drive. In the Exchange management console DB1 & DB2 are mounted as it should be, but DB3 is unmounted, and while looking at the database path, it's referring to the E drive, which is missing.
It gets a bit weirder, the .edb file from DB3 is placed on the D drive, but I can not change the database path from E to D, because of the missing E drive. I have no backuplog errors from the time of the backup, so my question is, what could have gone wrong?

Regards
Nicolai

[foggy]

Nicolai, just to be on the same page with you, what type of restore are you trying to perform? Is it Windows File-Level Restore? What Veeam B&R version are you using?

[witt]

I've made an Entire vm, and I'm using B&R 5.0

[foggy]

Not sure similar behavior has been ever reported... Did you have a chance to try another type of restore (instant recovery, database file restore)? If your Exchange version is 2010, I believe you could try to upgrade Veeam B&R to the latest version and use Veeam Explorer for Exchange to retrieve the required mailbox directly from the restored database file.

[Vitaliy S.]

It gets a bit weirder, the .edb file from DB3 is placed on the D drive, but I can not change the database path from E to D, because of the missing E drive. I have no backuplog errors from the time of the backup, so my question is, what could have gone wrong?

So just to make sure I understand your situation - you had a VM with three disks, and after a complete VM restore you have only two present in the guest OS? What about other data from the E drive? Is it on the D drive as well? What type of virtual disk do you have for the E drive on the source VM?

[witt]

It's exchange 2010, and I've tried to do a restore through Explorer for Exchange, I installed the trial version of B&R 6.5.
When I tried the restore I've got the following error: http://i.imgur.com/F8o2lzR.jpg .

Yes, there's only two out of the three drives present, and the database path to out 3rd database is pointing to the missing E drive. The E drive has only been used to store our 3rd Exchange database on.
The disk is a basic MBR drive.

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, there's only two out of the three drives present, and the database path to out 3rd database is pointing to the missing E drive.

If you're doing full VM restore/Instant VM Recovery, then you should have all VM disks in-place.

As to you error message, then please take a look at this topic for a possible resolution:
6.5 Exchange Explorer - should it work with 6.1 backup?

If it doesn't help, then I would suggest contacting our support team with the debug logs for further investigation.

[veremin]

Additionally, you might want to try Windows File-Level Restore through VB&R 6.5 and see whether you experience similar problem ( like, several partitions being merged, given drive being not present, etc.).

Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

Just a thought, since you're on version 5, could your issue be related to this behavior that was fixed in later versions of Veeam B&R - File level restore on Windows: Drive letters wrong?

[witt]

Thank you for your replies, I will try to do a full VM restore through B&R 6.5, I'll get back with the results.
I don't think the problem is relating to the wrong drive letters, since the C & D drive otherwise is normal.