Database file corruption is a fairly common occurrence in MS Exchange server due to various unforeseen causes. After facing a crash, human errors, hardware issue, virus attack or a software conflict, your Exchange database file may get damaged.

If your Exchange server starts acting weirdly, unable to mount the database on startup, then you are possibly experiencing serious data corruption in your database pages. If you do not identify and deal with the problem quickly, this corruption is likely to spread over the entire Exchange Server application making your server dead. This may leave you in a situation of severe data loss. To avoid a data loss catastrophe in such situations, you should opt for advanced third-party Exchange recovery software.

Imagine a situation that you are using Exchange 2010 server as an email server application in your organization, when you attempt to start your Exchange Information store, you fail in your attempts and faces the below error message:

The write operation will fail with error -1808 (0xfffff8f0).

In addition, if you analyze your application log you will see the following event entry:

Due to this abrupt behavior of Information store, you cannot even perform any task on your Exchange database file.

As per the Event description in log file, this issue can be caused by the low disk space on the server drive. This problem can also be caused by the corruption in Exchange database file.

You can try following ways to solve this problem:

• If your disk has low space as stated in event description, you need to make some free space on the Exchange server information store drive. After making the free disk space on the drive, then try to mount the Exchange information store database again.
• If disk space is not issue, then it may be your database is corrupted. If you have corrupted Exchange database file then you can run eseutil utility to verify and repair the database. But, these built-in tools can only help you to a certain extent because of their limitations. In case of severely damaged, database file will not be repaired by the eseutil tools, you will have to use a third party Exchange database recovery software. The commercial data recovery applications ensure that your Exchange sever continue to work properly.