Now that Exchange was installed, I could start trying to restore the mailboxes and get my email back up and running.

Following some instructions I’d downloaded from Microsoft I realised I would have to dismount the stores, run Backup and restore the backup I’d made on Friday evening.

After solving a few errors, I’d managed to get the backup restored and did a hard recovery. Didn’t seem to be any errors in the actual mail store, which was a good sign I thought. Went around in circles for a bit here, as I couldn’t actually get the mail store mounted again, but I fixed that eventually. Even tried using the Recovery Store Group, but that just wasted even more time. I went back to restoring the email directly into the First Storage Group where it seemed happier to be!

Now onto the task of getting into my email… not as easy as it sounds. I worked out that I needed to reassociate the mailbox “Alex” with the user account “Alex” in AD. Exchange has a command called “Reconnect” which does the trick. Now my mailbox and account were associated again… but for some reason OWA wasn’t letting me in. I haven’t solved this yet, I’ll hopefully be able to tonight!

I did manage to run ExMerge on my mailbox though, so I’ve now got a PST file with all my email in it; which I opened in Outlook on my dad’s PC to check everything was still intact, which it was! Once I knew my email was safe, then I knew I could stop what I was doing and go to bed happy in that knowledge.