After moving and dumping several hundred mailboxes between servers it was necessary to carry out an offline defrag of some databases. On one of the databases, the defrag took several hours longer than expected because the admin carrying out the task ran the defrag to the local disk which had insufficient space, instead of the secondary partition. This meant that the defrag ran into working hours and several hundred users were without a mailbox for several hours. To avoid this in the future I'd like to know if it is possible to stop the offline defrag and mount the store again? Thanks in advance............

If you cant carry out the Offline Defrag on your Local machine due to disk space, you can also carry out the operation on NON Exchange server. See below How to run Eseutil on a computer without Exchange Server You can also map Network drive and redirect the offline defrag to network drive exchsrvr\bin\eseutil /d "location of .edb file" /tX :\tempdfg.edb We always make 2 copies of D/B prior to performing the Offline Defrag. and i had a situation where to break the operation in between and start over. Luckily it didnot break anything. Vinod |CCNA|MCSE 2003 +Messaging|MCTS|ITIL V3|

For the future, it's often a better option to skip the defrag and just create a new database to move the users into. That way once you've moved some people to another server, you can move the rest to a new database and just throw away the old one. Outage is minimized, space usage is minimized, everything happy.And with Exchange 2010 you can do those moves /online/ without interrupting the users.

I didn't see anyone answer the "can you cancel" - the answer is YES. When you defrag, eseutil makes a temp####.edb and temp####.stm that it "rewrites" the DB to. If you control-C anywhere in the process, it leaves your original edb/stm in place, and deletes the temp edb/stm it was writing to.Chris

Thanks that what I wanted to know, just in case I was to find myself in the same boat again. Thanks for all the other answers all the same! We already have maximum storage groups on our Exch 2K3 servers so the option to move all mailboxes is not there, without creating another server or fragmenting other database which defeats the object in the first place!