Well, After a lot of fighting and googling and getting myself closer to the actual problem I determinded that there was an issue with the ADAMNTDS.DIT database. I tried using th dsdbutil.exe but to no avail. I was getting Jet errors and other failures everytime I tried to perform an operation on the database. So after that I went to esentutl.exe. This is actually quite a powerful program. I tried the Recovery option first with esentutl /r edb. This failed with the error JET_errLogFileCorrupt so obviously I wasn't going to be able to replay the missing transactions into the database. I accepted this and went to the restore option. The command line that I ran was esentutl /p adamntds.dit I got a warning about only running Repair on damaged or corrupted databases as transaction logs would be lost, to this I answered OK. The process completed and no errors were produced. At this point I tried to start the Microsoft Echange ADAM service, still the service did not start with the same errors as before. I tried repairing again, tried the recovery again and nothing seemed to allow the service to start. After a light bulb went off in my head I saw that the transaction logs and other files were still in the Adam directory. So, I copied out the directory to a temp location (just to be safe) and then deleted ALL files in the directory except for the adamntds.dit. I tried starting the ADAM service again, and low and behold the service started. As well, as soon as the service started the transaction log files were created again and the two JRS placeholders were created as well. I went and started up the remaining Exchange services that couldn't start due to dependancies and they all started as well. So everything looks fine now. All services are running and I've now gone and backed up the file system as well to make sure this doesn't happen again. So there's only really two commands that you need to know for this fix: esentutl /r edb and if that doesn't work esentutl /p adamntds.dit. Execute the first one and if everything is happy after that then you don't need to run the second. Run the commands from witihin the directory that houses the Exchange Edge AD LDS database (on my system it was C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\TransportRoles\data\Adam) Mark

Hello all, I have a MS Exchange 2010 Edge server running with ForeFront Threat Management Gateway 2010 and Forefront Protection 2010 for Exchange Server all on the same virtual server. Until recently I have not had any issues with this configuration. Unfortunately I had a drive in my RAID 0 die and I had to go through recovery to bring my server back up. After bringing the server back online I can see that all services have started, except a few Exchange and ForeFront TMG services. I have nailed the culpirit down to being the Microsoft Exchange ADAM service. No matter what I do I cannot get this service to start. When trying to start from services.msc I get the error "Windows could not start the Microsoft Exchange ADAM service on %servername% Error 0xc0000001: 0xc0000001" (note, I removed the actual servername out for identity protection). As well, when I look in the System Event log and the following error is listed there from the start attempt: "The Microsoft Exchange ADAM service terminated with the following error: %%-1073741823". I dug further into the service itself and found that it is dsamain.exe that is getting called. So, I tried running dsamain.exe from command line. Right after the command is entered I get the following message: "EVENTLOG (Error): NTDS General / Initialization/Termination : 2874". I have tried rebooting this server multiple times as well as performing a full chkdsk /f. Still to no avail I cannot get this service to start. Googole has not yielded many results either for me. As well, the RAID array that had to be recovered has 6 other virtual systems on it, none of these servers showed any data loss, nor do they have any issues with applications that I can see on the surface. Any assistance in troubleshootin this issue would be greatly appreciated. I can provide log files and any other information that is needed. Thanks, Mark

Thank you so much for details and solution sharing, I was follwoing your thread :)Anil MCC 2011,ITIL V3,MCSA 2003,MCTS 2010, My Blog : http://messagingschool.wordpress.com

thanks for sharing your experience

Hi According to the error, AD service can’t be initialized. The folder or file of ADAM service is broken or lost. Maybe you can try to restore process again.