[batmanstrikes]

Firstly, Hi

I've been a long time lurker on this site and have generally found the answer or been pointed in the right direct to things i need, so thanks.

However

I've been asked to look at a domain running 2 windows 2000 domian servers (amongest others), no1 and no2, both are in seperate geographic locations and have a very slow link between, both are exchange/file/dns servers.

no1 is the dc and has recently exchange services have been failing for no apparent reason. a restart of the services will sometimes cures the issue, if not a reboot will. at first i thought i had space issues on the servers but after a re jig of files i am still having the same issue's.

Error logs do not really point to anything that that suggests a long term problem.

So i decided to check the state of the drives, much to my horror the C: drive is almost completely fragmented. Despite having 27% free space there is no white in the diagram at all. I believe this is the reason for my random failures. Sadly the windows defrag dosn't do anything to help the situation. I also checked other drives on the server, both of which are in a similar situation

The server has a raid setup, which i am not very familiar with. there are 5 x 18.2gb (91gb) drives. The server then shows in my computer as having c: 5.85gb, d: 28gb, e: 16.9gb (51gb). In disk management, it shows as c: and d: on disk 0 and e: on disk 1, both are dynamic.

Firstly i was wondering is there a method of defragmenting such a badly fragmented drives.
If not is would would be the best/quickest and safest method of resolving the problems. I am currently thinking along the lines of making backups of everything, twice, taking an image of each of the drives then reloading the images, after formatting the drives. I am not terribly familar with norton ghost and was wondering if it is capable of such a task across a raid config and multiply drives. I really don't want to have to rebiuld the server from scratch as it is the DC and holds pretty much everything for the network, exchange, files, AV, IIS, DNS etc etc, i do have other computer avaliable for DNS and files but email is the most important part of this business that a windows server has to deal with.

The server is windows 2000 running exchange 2000.

Any help would be great, thanks

Mark

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failing how?

As for defragmenting, why not run the defrag at an off hour and see if that helps before getting so far ahead of yourself.

I do think you out to be creating an image of some sort, but it would be unlikely a fragmented disk could cause a failure (wiull cause slowness)

So,when you sayit is failing, how is it failing....what are the symptoms? People cannot get their email? Server crashes? No file access?

Also, when you checked defragmentation, did you mean disk, or exchange database defragmentation?

Exchange regularly defrags the database based on the time you set, but while this improves access, it does not deal with a similar related issue--database size. As people delete email, the database record is removed, but the space the record used is not marked as free.

If you have NEVER done and offline defragmentation, and the server has been in use for a while, then you really need to consider it

Here is a kb article

http://support.micro....com/?id=328804

[gerryf]

failing how?

As for defragmenting, why not run the defrag at an off hour and see if that helps before getting so far ahead of yourself.

I do think you out to be creating an image of some sort, but it would be unlikely a fragmented disk could cause a failure (wiull cause slowness)

So,when you sayit is failing, how is it failing....what are the symptoms? People cannot get their email? Server crashes? No file access?

Also, when you checked defragmentation, did you mean disk, or exchange database defragmentation?

Exchange regularly defrags the database based on the time you set, but while this improves access, it does not deal with a similar related issue--database size. As people delete email, the database record is removed, but the space the record used is not marked as free.

If you have NEVER done and offline defragmentation, and the server has been in use for a while, then you really need to consider it

Here is a kb article

http://support.micro....com/?id=328804

[batmanstrikes]

hi

thanks the point in the right direction, sorry for the lack of reply, had something else to look at

the syptoms are that messages will take a while to leave the outbox, then minutes later everything will go, users get a message the server is unaviliable. this happens roughly once every 48hrs.

if i try to restart the information store service it just hangs on stopping, a restart will cure all the problems.

i am currently waiting for it to crash again, i have cleared all event logs since they were full of other IIS and AV crap which has now been sorted.

I have also asked people to have a clear out since joke emails are pretty excessive here i've noticed. I am then going todo and offline defrag tonight. Situation has been complicated since there isn't enough room on the local disk to perform this task.

Thanks

mark

[dsenette]

are the users allowed unlimited mailbox sizes? if so...i'd set up a strict size limiter....that's probably where your server's bogging down...it's trying to keep track of too much stuff....also in each user's outlook configuration on their machines...set up a "personal folder" that either get's stored on their local machine..or on a larger file server...that way when they want to save mails...especially large ones...they can pull it off the mail server and stick it in that personal folder which will free up space on the mail server for sure....