Exchange Server generates a checksum for a page, which is written to the disk after it writes all the data to the page. This includes writing the page number also. After adding checksum to the page, the Exchange then moves to write pages to the disk. A database page is declared as corrupt if its page number and/or checksum mismatches. In such situations, you should consider repairing the database or restoring from the latest backup. In case when no clean backup is available, you should run an Repair EDB tool

You might come across the below error with your Exchange Server database:

“The database page read failed verification because of a -1018 error (page number mismatch)”

Error 1018 is associated with event 475 displaying in the application event log. The error is generally encountered when you try to perform online backup or online defragmentation.

Cause

The above error is a typical symptom of database damage at page level. It occurs when database page read fails verification because of mismatch in a page number. It indicates that the database page that has been referenced in the store file is damaged. Such errors are usually observed because of firmware, hardware or driver issues.

Solution

To solve the problem discussed above, you need to try these methods:

  • You should run system diagnostics to determine the exact root of the problem. You may not come to a definite conclusion if the corruption occurs rarely or occurs while heavy load conditions. If the hardware issues come out as problematic, you should consider replacing them.

  • You can upgrade the disk firmware and controller BIOS to the latest versions available.

  • To repair the corrupted database, you need to run eseutil repair utility. Try to avoid performing hard recovery as this will delete the corrupted pages from database. Instead, you should restore the database from backup if available and is valid.

If all the attempts fail, you need a suitable third-party solution for EDB Repair. These are perfect EDB Repair Software built with safe scanning technology to repair and restore a damaged Exchange database.

Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery is a powerful and secure tool to perform systematic repair of damaged Exchange databases created with Exchange Server 5.5, 2000 and 2003. It is a comprehensive EDB Repair tool that extracts all user mailboxes by converting them into individual Outlook usable .pst files. The tool can recover all email messages, notes, journals, tasks and other objects.