Exchange 5.5 disaster

Our exchange server went down early this morning. One of the hard drives failed. The other was corrupted but we were able to salvage it to reinstall exchange. Our most recent backup was last Wednesday - a full backup that we can't access until tomorrow (in a vault and today's a holiday). We've gotten everyone back up so that they can use their email. Those with .pst files are set to go, while those with information on the server will be restored tomorrow. We are still missing all the public folders though. What is the best way to bring them back? Where are they located? We use backup exec 8.5 exchange agent to backup data. It has been running well and we're able to restore mailboxes easily although I haven't tried a restore on a greater scale. For the future, what is the best way to test the backup/restore? Last week I tried to restore everything to another server (to use for testing offline) and I couldn't get past the message that it would only restore to the original exchange server. Thanks for the help!