Andrew,

WE had a similar situation of hardware failure on our exchange server and
had to rebuild and recover from ADSM. Everything looks good upto completing
restore from ADSM. After this the only thing we did different was, we did
not try to start the Exchange server from script OR anything else but we did
a shutdown and restart on the Windows NT server and allowed the Exchange
server to roll forward / backward any logs to properly associate Directory
and  IS together. The server came back UP fine without any problem. But
before doing a reboot after the ADSM restore is complete, the directory OR
the IS service takes exceptionally long to start OR even fails most of the
time.

I hope this helps,

Prasanna Ghanekar
EDS
GM Pontiac East Assembly