Fix Exchange Server 2003 Dirty Shutdown and Save Your Exchange Server Data

While working on Exchange server, users come across various types of issues. Dirty shutdown issue is a common problem which becomes really irritating since it poses severe danger to your Exchange server information. exchange server 2003 dirty shutdown is an abnormal termination of your exchange server. It leaves your entire edb database in the verge of corruption. It is the nastiest thing which can happen to the Exchange server administrator by posing problems to the entire organization.

Causes of exchange server 2003 dirty shutdown


Corrupted priv1.edb is the main cause of dirty shutdown. Generally such situations arises if the information stores are not closed in a proper way due to power surges, incorrect system shutdown, software malfunctioning, virus infections etc. It is a matter of concern as it is directly associated to Exchange server EDB files. With abnormal termination of your Exchange database, the administrator tries to mount priv.edb files to the Exchange server and also gives the following message:

File: priv1.STM ERROR: database was not shutdown cleanly (dirty shutdown).


How dirty shutdown can be checked on your system?


  • Click on start and then to run
  • In the open box, type CMD and after that click on OK
  • After that switch to C:Program FilesExchServrBin folder and type the following commands and press enter
  • Type eseutil/mh

How to fix exchange server 2003 dirty shutdown:


If mailbox could not be mounted it is probably the case of dirty shutdown. In some cases, if dirty shutdown occurs MS Exchange have components which will automatically recover itself to a clean state. Also delete the chk and log files. It is always recommended to keep the size of your Exchange database not more than 100 GB. If CCR environment is being used, then the size can grow more than 100 GB as there will be multiple copies for recovery.

You can take the help of ESEUTIL utilities like -/p and -/r for repairing the corrupted Exchange server database. It is always recommended to maintain a valid backup so that data can be recovered from it. If these methods does not work, Exchange users can go for Edb Recovery Software which will easily repair priv1.edb database and user mailboxes. It supports Exchange server recovery from almost all versions such as Exchange server 5.0, 2000, 2003, 5.5 and 2007 databases.