Exchange 2007/2010 Get Out Of Jail Quick Card - No Disk Space

Exchange 2007/2010 Get Out Of Jail Quick Card - No Disk Space

Taken from: http://cosonok.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/exchange-20072010-get-out-of-jail-quick.html

Scenario:

Your Exchange 2007/2010 has run out of disk space on the partition holding the mailbox database and the database has dismounted, there is no quick way to increase the size of the partition, and it looks like the only solution is to move the database to another drive, which will mean downtime whilst the database is dismounted during the move.

Solution:

(A temporary fix to get the database up and running.)

In the folder where the EDB file for the affected Mailbox Database resides, there is a folder with name beginning catalogdata which can be quite large (for example - 15GB for a 250GB database):

If the Microsft Exchange Search Service is stopped by running the command

net stop MsExchangeSearch

or stopping the Microsoft Exchange Search Indexer from services.msc

then the entire catalogdata folder can be shift deleted

After this is done, DO NOT restart the Microsoft Exchange Search Service for two reasons:

1: Restarting MsExchangeSearch will cause the Full-Text Index Catalog to get rebuilt which may fill to the same size as before

2: Rebuilding the Full-Text Index Catalog can cause high CPU utilization, and is best rebuilt out of business hours

Remember this is only a temporary fix to give some breathing space whilst downtime for the mailbox database to be moved to a larger drive - or whatever - can be arranged. Free space on server disk partitions should always be monitored.

Cheers!

Further reading - How to Rebuild the Full-Text Index Cataloghttp://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa995966(EXCHG.80).aspx