Now that Exchange was installed, I could start trying to restore the mailboxes and get my email back up and running.

Following some instructions I'd downloaded from Microsoft I realised I would have to dismount the stores, run Backup and restore the backup I'd made on Friday evening.

After solving a few errors, I'd managed to get the backup restored and did a hard recovery. Didn't seem to be any errors in the actual mail store, which was a good sign I thought. Went around in circles for a bit here, as I couldn't actually get the mail store mounted again, but I fixed that eventually. Even tried using the Recovery Store Group, but that just wasted even more time. I went back to restoring the email directly into the First Storage Group where it seemed happier to be! ;)

Now onto the task of getting into my email... not as easy as it sounds. I worked out that I needed to reassociate the mailbox "Alex" with the user account "Alex" in AD. Exchange has a command called "Reconnect" which does the trick. Now my mailbox and account were associated again... but for some reason OWA wasn't letting me in. I haven't solved this yet, I'll hopefully be able to tonight!

I did manage to run ExMerge on my mailbox though, so I've now got a PST file with all my email in it; which I opened in Outlook on my dad's PC to check everything was still intact, which it was! Once I knew my email was safe, then I knew I could stop what I was doing and go to bed happy in that knowledge.