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 Help Restoring / Rebuilding Database

Author  Topic 

hesaloser
Starting Member

3 Posts

Posted - 2007-09-04 : 11:01:20
Hey all,
I'm a newbie to SQL, the organization i work for recently had a server experience a multiple hard-drive failure, corrupted the OS, etc etc. We called in a data recovery specialist who used an Ontrack tool to pull the SQL files we could off of the dead server and onto a different server. Question being how do i attempt a restore from disk, and also the Ontrack recovery software created a directory named "LOSTFILE" which contains multiple directories which contain a variety of different filetypes. Has anyone experienced a similar situation? Any ideas how i can get this resolved?

Ultimately i'd like to setup a new server and transfer the recovered files to it.

Any ideas or help is greatly appreciated,

Thanks!

SwePeso
Patron Saint of Lost Yaks

30421 Posts

Posted - 2007-09-04 : 11:06:11
Where is your most recent backup?



E 12°55'05.25"
N 56°04'39.16"
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Zoroaster
Aged Yak Warrior

702 Posts

Posted - 2007-09-04 : 11:19:57
quote:
Originally posted by hesaloser

Hey all,
I'm a newbie to SQL, the organization i work for recently had a server experience a multiple hard-drive failure, corrupted the OS, etc etc. We called in a data recovery specialist who used an Ontrack tool to pull the SQL files we could off of the dead server and onto a different server. Question being how do i attempt a restore from disk, and also the Ontrack recovery software created a directory named "LOSTFILE" which contains multiple directories which contain a variety of different filetypes. Has anyone experienced a similar situation? Any ideas how i can get this resolved?

Ultimately i'd like to setup a new server and transfer the recovered files to it.

Any ideas or help is greatly appreciated,

Thanks!



Was he able to recover your data and log file?

------------------------
Future guru in the making.
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hesaloser
Starting Member

3 Posts

Posted - 2007-09-04 : 11:43:23
Peso, most recent backup is months old, and the data hasn't even been validated. I would rather assume for the sake of discussion that the backup does not exist at this point in time.

Zoroaster, what i have is a directory named "data", inside "data" is two subfolders named "C" and "E" also a text file titled "report.txt". If i had to assume i would say C, and E are both respective partitions where SQL data was found.

Not sure if there is simply 1 master log file? Not sure where that would be? There are some log files mixed into the madness...

Also my other major concern is it appears that all the data is here, however it also looks like the "LOSTFILE" directory in "E" contains a lot of .img files which was the format of the scanned documents being stored in the SQL databases...not sure if there is a way to piece it all back together?
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Kristen
Test

22859 Posts

Posted - 2007-09-04 : 12:30:15
Generally SQL Server uses two files:

MyDatabaseName.MDF or MyDatabaseName_DATA.MDF
MyDatabaseName.LDF or MyDatabaseName_LOG.LDF

If the SQLService was stopped at the time of the failure (which seems unlikely!) then you can get away with just having the MDF file. If that's all you have got then its worth a try on its own. Otherwise you need the LDF file.

If you have both then use the ATTACH process, if just the MDF is available try the SingleFileAttach process.

Kristen
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hesaloser
Starting Member

3 Posts

Posted - 2007-09-04 : 12:56:44
We have multiple cabinets, each cabinet has its own folder within either C or E respectively, each cabinet folder has 2 .mdf's and .ldf's. I haven't looked into the attach process yet, (i'm a total SQL noob), but from what it sounds if each cabinet has an .ldf and .mdf they should be restore-able?
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tkizer
Almighty SQL Goddess

38200 Posts

Posted - 2007-09-04 : 13:08:20
Not necessarily. You'll find out once you try it though.

Tara Kizer
Microsoft MVP for Windows Server System - SQL Server
http://weblogs.sqlteam.com/tarad/
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Kristen
Test

22859 Posts

Posted - 2007-09-04 : 13:34:15
If the Ontrack process has retrieve a file that is intact I reckon its no worse that a powercut scenario.

Slight difference is that with a powercut information about the database is known from the Master database etc., whereas with ATTACH SQL Server is going to want the database files being attached to be "operational", and the disk failure may have corrupted them etc.

Take a copy of the files before you try to attach them

Kristen
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