We recently had an outage on our DC - one disk out of a 4 disk raid array failed and it ran in degraded mode for about 3 weeks before we were able to replace the disk. By the last day before it got replaced, exchange was running so poorly that for some users it would fall over as soon as they opened their mailbox (I assumed they had corrupt mailboxes). We replaced the disk and the rebuild was a success, but when the exchange DB was still corrupt, and got restored from backups a week only - blowing away a small subset of emails.
All that was completed by another staffmember, but here is where I step in - about a month later and some staff are discovering that an email that was lost is super important. When they restored from the backup they put a copy of the exchange database they restored to in a new iSCSI drive along with the logs from between the backup being taken and the server being restored. From what I have been told, this should be enough to get us a working view of the mailstore on that day so that I can get the 5 or 10 really important messages out of there.
Problem is I know nothing about exchange. Google suggested http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124040(v=exchg.65).aspx and similar pages but these seem to be to do with repairing the running database, which is not what I want - right now email is working, I don't want to change that.
We use SBS 2008 and Exchange 2007 - any suggestions on where to start would be greatly appreciated.