A guide to recover
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Database+in+suspect/69133/
Printed 2010/02/08 01:46AM
A guide to recover a database out from Suspect mode
By UTSAB CHATTOPADHYAY, 2009/12/22
One of the worst situations I can imagine for a database professional is to get a call reporting a production database is in a "Suspect" state and the business cannot continue. This is a "code red" situation where DBA needs to bring the database online as soon as possible. In this article, I will formulate couple of steps which may be used as a high level process to handle this situation. The first step is always to inform your customer about the outage before they come back to you. I find most of the times this proactive step becomes a life saver. In this way, you will not be questioned for the time you will spend to bring the database online. Then refer to the SQL Server error log to find the root cause of the issue. It will give you a clear reason mentioning why the database is in Suspect mode. From SQL Server 2005 onwards, I recommend to use a filter while viewing the log and use "Database name" as the filter criteria. In this way you will only see the logs related to that particular database and then refer to the latest log/s for the root cause. Up until SQL Server 2000, the only option is reading the log from the latest entry backwards to find the root cause. Assuming you found the reason why database is in suspect mode, now you need to take appropriate step to fix the issue. Here I will discuss some of the possible issues which can put a database in Suspect mode and recommend appropriate resolution. Possibility 1: Some one deleted/misplaced a data/log file when SQL Server was offline and the database can not start because of missing file. The solution is to place the missing data/log file in proper location. The SQL Server Error Log error message will give you the exact name and path of the missing file. Once you place the file execute below command to bring