Lucid8 created this article as a courtesy and will not provide further support or guidance unless you have engaged a team member for paid Professional Services for Microsoft Exchange.  All information in this article is provided on an "AS IS" basis with no warranties, guarantees of completeness, accuracy, usefulness or timeliness, and as such any action you take thereafter, are done so at your own risk.  


NOTE: If you would like assistance in regards to your Exchange Database .EDB files, for self-service check out DigiScope or engage one of our experts for paid  Professional Services for Microsoft Exchange  assistance.


Using ESEUTIL /M to read Database, Log & Checkpoint Files

Every Database, Log and Checkpoint files have header contains internal information used by Exchange. 

ATTENTION: To view the database header using the ESEUTIL tool, the database must first be dismounted/offline 


Dismount the database using the following cmdlet:

Dismount-Database –Identity <database_name>


Viewing the Exchange Database Header

Execute the following cmdlet to display the Exchange database header


Template:

ESEUTIL /MH <database_name>


Usage Example:

ESEUTIL /MH Fabrikam-13

As you can see above the Fabrikam-13 database is in a Clean Shutdown state which in short means there is no incompatibility between the information in log file and the database. The header contains a lot of information about the database, such as the date of creation, state of the database file, Log Required, Log Committed, dB Signatures and more


The header called "Log Required" designates which log files are required to start the database. In this case, the value shows 0-0 which suggests that no log files are required. However, in the case where a database had been stopped unexpectedly, the values would be populated with the required logs.  To see a working example of this check out the KB article "ESEUTIL /R - Soft Recovery of an Exchange Database"

EXCHANGE DATABASE LOG FILES

Log files are numbered in sequence according to this naming scheme: EnnXXXXX.log, where Enn represents the log ile prefix, such as E00, E01, E02, etc., and XXXXX represents the log file generation or sequence number using hexadecimal. 


EXCHANGE LOG HEADER

The log prefix for the Fabrikam-13 database is "E01", therefore to examine the headers of the Fabrikam Exchange prefix log file – E01.log using the cmdlet below:


ESEUTIL /ML E01.log


The results are presented in the image below:

In the screenshot above, you can see lGeneration number, which represents a sequential log number to be used in the future – in the example above, it is E0000000469.log. You can also notice that next to the Signatures header, there is the following number displayed: 3799674947 – the same # in the database file header dump above. This shows that this log file belongs to the database.


CHECKING THE LOG SEQUENCE

In order to check the log sequence as well as their state, you can use cmdlet  below which is just like the previous cmdlet, however without the .log designation


ESEUTIL /ML E01

As you can see, the sequence consists of only two logs: E00.log and E0000000468.log. The additional information shows there are not any problems at this moment.


CHECKPOINT HEADER

The last file that we can take a look at is the checkpoint file E01.chk. Run the cmdlet below to display results: 

ESEUTIL /MK E01.chk

One of the important pieces of information that you can find here is the name of the last checkpoint – the file that has been already added to the database. In this case, it is 469 which refers to the file E01.log that will become a log file named E00000000469.log. Of course, what is always significant is the signature pointing to the log file which corresponds with the E00.chk file.


NOTE:  Lucid8 created this article as a courtesy and will not provide further support or guidance unless you have engaged a team member for paid Professional Services for Microsoft Exchange.  All information in this article is provided on an "AS IS" basis with no warranties, guarantees of completeness, accuracy, usefulness or timeliness, and as such any action you take thereafter, are done so at your own risk. 

NOTE: If you would like assistance in regards to your Exchange Database .EDB files, for self-service check out DigiScope or engage one of our experts for paid  Professional Services for Microsoft Exchange  assistance.