Hi all
sorry if this is a bit long

am having some issues and would appreciate any ideas/help, a drive came in that was detected by bios, the system would not boot any further.
i made an image of the drive in full and using different tools was able to see 2 partitions a C and D, C drive seems to be ok D is not accessible, after using the tools i have i have gone through both drives and have successfuly found the pub1 edb and stm files but cannot locate the priv1 edb files.
i have been through the drive with different recovery tools, i can see everyo picture, pdf file word and excel file but canot locate the priv1 which i believe is needed to restore the exchange server.
has anyone experienced this before? i found the MDBDATA folder and it is 8.5gb in size, in there i can find lots of log files and alot of notepad files, when i open a notepad file if i read past all the junk you can see actual emails and addresses, i am totally lost.

thanks for any ideas

Have you tried Ontracks PowerControls? Give it a try and it should let you extract all the PSTs. More of a recovery than a repair, but better than losing the data for good!

When your file Level recovery tools don't work there is always Winhex.
If you must recover the Exchange Server as a store, you can analyze the hex values of the priv1.edb. and priv1.stm headers & Footers of a intact Exchange Server. Then search for the Header and Footer values in Winhex or any other good hex editor and manually carb the files out.

This usually works for me.

thx for those answers guys,
i have had a look at power controls but to my understanding since i oly have the pub1.edb power controls cant recover mail boxes with this, i had a look at the demo and spoke with ontrack about a purchase and was told the same,,
i have never used winhex but will look into it, as a general point thx HDDGUY for the advise about the pci 3000, it is something i am seriously considering buying, i am just trying to research it more and make sure the oney is being spent correctly and wisely, living in australia it is very hard to make such a decision as i would like to see th unit in operation and it is not available here,
has any one used tools from YEC-USA such as Kessander for recovery.

thank you

You can find Ontrack PowerControls website here: http://www.ontrackpowercontrols.com/ They have a Free Trial and demo listed on the homepage if you've never used it. Screenshots of the new 4.2 version here: http://www.ontrackpowercontrols.com/resources/features/ Cool tool.