Just before this problem Entourage could not display the email in one of my
folders (i/o error message)
I'm surprised Disk Warrior didn't pick on a problem. An I/O error almost
always means disk damage. Your description of trying to copy also indicates
disk problems. If it is disk damage your database could be fine.[/QUOTE]
Several more things to add - 1) I got the i/o error yesterday - Today: I couldn't even open Entourage, access the database from the database utility, nor copy the database from the finder.
2) My drive was quite full - (huge undeleted trash) - but I deleted that before attempting copying, etc. today.
3) Disk warrior did find an error in disk information which it corrected - this was related to remaining free disk space. Disk warrior did not find any difference between directory information nor any other errors (so it certainly did not find an error identified with the database or any other file.
I will also add that I am using Disk Warrior 3.03. This should be fine on 10.4 - but the drive has been connected to an OS 10.5 mac -- so maybe I need the latest Disk Warrior.
Verify that you database is in this location. Unless you renamed your
Identity, it's called Main.
~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities/Main Identity
Can you tell me how much free space you have? Open the Activity Monitor in
Utilities. Click on the Disk Usage tab (near the bottom of the window) and
tell me how much "space utilized" and how much "free space".
How old is your drive? Note, age isn't necessarily a factor in damage. New
drives can go bad too.
Answers to your questions:
1) I have my microsoft user data folder on an external hard drive that I use as a "sneakernet" drive -that i tote back and forth work/home. This has always worked flawlessly in the past and I had made no changes.
(I can't even move it back since I can't copy the database file to the same disk, nor to the internal drive) The folder is accessed via an alias.
2) Free space on external drive where the microsoft user data resides: 5 Gb (Note - I was quite low on free space up until this morning (about 850mb) -- but I had already freed up over 4gb (by emptying trash)
From Activity Monitor - I have over 58Gb free on my internal drive
3)External drive is old - many years
Internal drive was replaced <6 months ago - but has occaisionally made some odd noises lately.
NOTE: Tomorrow I can connect the external drive to a newer machine running 10.5 - but I doubt that will matter if I can't even finder copy the database file.
Sorry if my initial post was lacking key info.
Thanks for any advice!
