XADM: Esefile Support Utility for Exchange Server

ID: Q248406

The information in this article applies to:

Microsoft Exchange Server, version 5.5 SP3

SUMMARY

The Esefile utility is a new utility that ships with Exchange Server version 5.5 Service Pack 3 (SP3). It is in the Support folder on the SP3 CD, and there are separate versions for the Intel and Alpha platforms. You can use this utility on Exchange Server 5.0 and 5.5 databases.

Following is the command line for the utility:

esefile [/c source destination] [/x file] [/s file] [/d file page number]

/c copies source to destination
/s Ese.dll format checksum
/x Edb.dll format checksum
/d dumps a page from a file

MORE INFORMATION

There are two main uses for this utility: copying files, and testing the checksums on an Exchange Server database.

Copying Files

To copy files by using the Esefile utility, type the following command:

esefile/c source destination

This method of copying files is optimized for large files. The files are opened uncached, so you can copy files that are larger than can be opened in cached mode. However, following are some of the limitations of this method:

Wildcards are not accepted.

You can only copy one file at a time.

The destination file cannot not be on a network drive.

File time stamps are not preserved.

The esefile/c command can copy any file, not just Exchange Server databases. Copying a file by using the esefile command is very fast; on large files (over 100 megabytes) it can be twice as fast as the Copy/Xcopy utility.

The esefile/c command can copy a file of any size. (The utilities in Windows NT such as Copy/Xcopy manipulate the files by caching the page pointer. The size of files that these utilities can copy is dependent on the available amount of contiguous non-paged pool memory in the system.)

Checksumming

This command verifies the page-level integrity of the database. It runs at a speed of approximately 1 gigabyte per minute. To test the checksums on an Exchange Server database, type one of the following commands, as applicable:

esefile/s database (ESE format Exchange Server 5.5)

esefile/x database (EDB format Exchange Server 5.0)

NOTE: If you use the /x switch on an ESE format database or the /s switch on an EDB format database a checksum error message is logged on every page.

The following is an example of a database that has the correct checksum:

Checksumming


          0    10   20   30   40   50   60   70   80   90  100
          |----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|
          ...................................................

          117250 pages seen
          0 bad checksums
          457 uninitialized pages
          0 wrong page numbers

          esefile completes sucessfully after 28 seconds

The following is an example of a database that has an incorrect checksum:

Checksumming


          0    10   20   30   40   50   60   70   80   90  100
          |----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|----|
          ...................................................         

          ERROR: page -1 checksum failed ( 0x39215350 / 0x291fed56 )
          ERROR: page 0 checksum failed ( 0xd7698bbc / 0x6a5d128b )

          117250 pages seen
          2 bad checksums
          457 uninitialized pages
          0 wrong page numbers

          esefile fails after 28 seconds

In this example, page -1 and page 0 did not pass the checksum, and when you try to start the information store, it does not start and logs the following error message in the application event log:

Event ID 5000 Source MSExchangeIS
Unable to initialize the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service.
Error Non-database file or corrupted database.

For additional information, click the article numbers below to view the articles in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

Q151789 Error -1018 (JET_errReadVerifyFailure)

Q237767 Making and Restoring Offline Backups

Additional query words:

Keywords : exc55sp3
Version : winnt:5.5 SP3
Platform : winnt
Issue type : kbinfo