How to restore a database using mdf and ldf files in Sql 2008

[aaronhill]

Hello,

Asking for expert opinion. A very unfortunate event happened. One of our PCs crashed few days ago. That PC had SQL Server 2008 installed. Unfortunately no backup was running on that server. We sent the disk to a data recovery place and looks like they can recover some of the mdf and ldf files. We are particularly interested in 1 particular database. My questions are:

1. Is this possible to restore a particular database using corresponding mdf and ldf files?
2. Do we need to have any mdfs from the system databases? Any other files we need to ask data recovery company t look for?
3. Steps and/or or best practices to restore that database into a new machine.

Thanks for your help in advance.

[gandolf989]

I'm not sure why you put a SQL Server post on an Oracle site, but maybe someone can help.
Using a recovery company to recover database files, seems problamatic to me. There is really
no replacing a good backup strategy. But I don't know that it won't work. You should probably
get the system database, although I am not sure that you absolutely need it.

[alanchen1]

Assuming the recovered MDF and LDF files are both healthy, then you can just use the following command to restore the database:

sp_attach_db "database_name" "yourfile.ldf" "yourfile.mdf"

See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib...ql.100%29.aspx for more detailed info.