It's a good idea to maintain enough free disk space to run the ESEUTIL utility on Exchange 2000 servers. Microsoft recommends maintaining 110 percent of your database size. Other options, such as copying the temporary database created by ESEUTIL to a network drive, slow down the utility and make the process less reliable.

But in the real world, it's not always possible to keep enough disk space available at all times. However, you can run ESEUTIIL against Exchange databases on a separate system that does have the disk space--even a system that doesn't have Exchange 2000 loaded.

To run ESEUTIL on a non-Exchange system, follow these steps:

  1. Copy Eseutil.exe, Ese.dll, Jcb.dll, Exosal.dll, and Exchmem.dll from Exchange Server's Exchsrvr\bin folder to a folder on the non-Exchange server.
  2. Place the database files that you want to run ESEUTIL against on the non-Exchange server. You can use ESEFILE, restore the files from an offline backup, or simply copy them over the network from the Exchange server.
  3. Run the desired ESEUTIL commands against the copied database.
  4. Once the command is complete, copy the database files back to the Exchange server.

The above method isn't as desirable as actually running ESEUTIL on Exchange Server--mainly due to the extra time it takes to copy and restore the databases to a different server--but this option is more reliable than the alternatives.