Hello Sir,
Sorry for this direct approach. I have been a huge follower of your blogs since the time I started my carrier some 8 years back. You have been a great mentor and source of information for many like myself.
Recently, I joined a new organization
and after sometime I found that there was a distribution database on our production server but no associated publisher or subscriber.
I tried to locate the .mdf and .ldf files for the same but found out that the underlying SAN was replaced without copying the files across.
Although we don’t replication, but the distribution database has got stuck in the management studio.
Whatever I do , ( I have tried many things) I get the below error . I even tried the following using the DAC
usemaster
go
alterdatabase distribution setoffline;
dropdatabase distribution
“The operating system returned error 21(The device is not ready.) to SQL Server during a read at offset 0x00000000056000 in file 'E:\XXX_Replication\Data\distribution.MDF'. Additional messages in the SQL Server error log and system event log may provide more detail. This is a severe system-level error condition that threatens database integrity and must be corrected immediately. Complete a full database consistency check (DBCC CHECKDB). This error can be caused by many factors; for more information, see SQL Server Books Online. “
Please help me in removing this distribution database from the management studio.