Monday 16 April 2012

Cannot activate a Database Copy because of a corrupt Catalog

Hi,

Recently I had an issue activating a database in an Exchange 2010 DAG.


"An Active Manager operation failed. Error: The database action failed. Error: An error occurred while trying to validate the specified database copy for possible activation. Error: Database cop 'Database02' on server 'xxxxx' has content index catalog files in the following state: 'Failed'.. [Database: Database02, Server: xxxxx]
"















This issue was of course stopping me from activating the copy and performing maintenance on the server currently hosting the active copy. Yes I have more than 2 copies of the database in the DAG, but rather than mounting another copy, I decided to fix the issue.


You are able to update a mailbox copies catalog rather than performing a full database update. You can perform this by simply using the -CatalogOnly parameter for the Update-MailboxDatabaseCopy cmdlet.


Example: Update-MailboxDatabaseCopy Database\DAGServer -CatalogOnly
















Once the catalog had updated, I was able to successfully move and activate the database on the required DAG member.















Take Care


Oliver Moazzezi MVP - Exchange Server

2 comments:

Matthew Van Sickler said...

Great tip Ollie! I'll file that one away for future reference.

Oliver Moazzezi said...

Hey dude,

Good to hear from you. Yeah it was a life saver as the database size was north of 1TB, so an update of just the catalog is just the ticket.