I again talked to the top experts. I talked to Microsoft's key people. Each told me that recovering from a crash differs from installation to installation and often, it's just not that easy. Each told me how much they felt my pain.

Then I went online. I searched Google and even tried other search engines. I started to get really scared when I found a small contingent of other folks reporting similar problems. You could feel their level of desperation, see that they, too, had gone through all the appropriate steps, and were left with...nothing.

Apparently, recovering after a bad Exchange crash is often problematic.

Some clues
So what went wrong? First of all, why did it crash in the first place?

Answering that question is easy. MTBF. Mean Time Between Failure. The server just got old. We hadn't replaced drives and other parts because every time we thought about moving Exchange to new hardware, we just got the creeps. Whenever we asked other Exchange experts about upgrading the hardware, we were consistently told, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

So we didn't. And after a few years of 24/7 operation, the drive just got old and died.

At least that makes sense.

What didn't make sense was why, after following Microsoft's backup instructions to the letter, and then following their recovery instructions equally religiously, we were so, totally, screwed.

At some point into my second week in the ninth circle, I began to get find some clues.

In the next few issues, I'll tell you about what I learned and give you some rough guidance in case you run into a similar problem. In any case, I feel your pain.

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's author of Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours (Sam's, 2003) and coauthor of OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.