Outlook 2000 SP2- PST file Recovery

P

Patrick

I have recently used a Linux Bootable CD (Knoppix 3.2)
to "recover" a 160MB PST file along with many other *.DOC
in a good partition of a broken hard disk.

Although the (high grade) CDR was ejected at 95%
completed, all other *.doc looks pretty readable, but:
1) When I try to copy the PST file onto a 6 years old
Compaq laptop with only a crap 4X CD Rom, it gave funny
noises when it gets to "35 seconds remaining" and after 5
mins, WinNT4 gave a system error saying input device
error. (At first I thought it was only my CD Rom drive
that is dodgy)

2) When I do a Knoppix Linux "more" on the file, I could
get the binary looking stuff, but if I do a tail -100 on
the file, I got an input device error.

As a quick experiment, I
1) Created a PST file with the following folders
--Deleted Items
--Test
----In

With about 100 email Items in the In folder

2) Opened the PST file (about 4MB) in notepad,
deleted 'just' about 10 characters towards the end of the
file (the last few lines appear blank anyway!).

3.1) Open the PST file in Outlook 2000, and it complains
it is corrupted, I should run the Inbox repair tool

3.2) Run the Inbox Repair Tool, it detected 2 folders and
0 items apparently!

3.3) Open the PST file in Outlook, and I get a "Recovered
Personal Folder" PST folder with just the deleted items
folder (it's a little bigger than the file size after I
deleted the 10 characters from it).

3.4) rerun 3.2 doesn't make any differences (no additional
email items recovered)

3.5) I could 'compact' the folder, which shrink it to 41
KB, no additional emails recovered, of course!

I did find something on the Internet, but it costs
GBP219!!!
http://www.ontrack.co.uk/easyrecovery/filerepair.asp

Any other good ideas?? (e.g. using any cheaper 3rd Party
Email programs to 'import' the corrputed PST file and then
using Outlook to 'import' from such 3rd party email
programs?? Text/Hex editing, etc.
 

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