recovering contacts from outlook data file

S

Sarah.

This is sort of a long silly story... the beginning of it is that I lost the
cradle for my pda and took some months in replacing it. During that time my
system crashed and I tried to reformat myself, then had to take it in to be
redone from scratch. Finally I have a new cradle for the pda, but the PDA
crashed and now all of my contacts have been wiped out. I have a disk with
my archives and an Outlook Data file that I bravely tried to rescue as my
system was crashing. Unfortunately I can't seem to get into the data file to
even see if my contacts are in there. Outlook tells me it's 'not a personal
folders file' but I can't seem to find any information on what, exactly, that
means. Any suggestions? I'd be happy to enter into a dialogue about this -
[email protected]
-Sarah.
 
L

Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]

Sarah. said:
This is sort of a long silly story... the beginning of it is that I
lost the cradle for my pda and took some months in replacing it.
During that time my system crashed and I tried to reformat myself,
then had to take it in to be redone from scratch. Finally I have a
new cradle for the pda, but the PDA crashed and now all of my
contacts have been wiped out. I have a disk with my archives and an
Outlook Data file that I bravely tried to rescue as my system was
crashing. Unfortunately I can't seem to get into the data file to
even see if my contacts are in there. Outlook tells me it's 'not a
personal folders file' but I can't seem to find any information on
what, exactly, that means. Any suggestions? I'd be happy to enter
into a dialogue about this - [email protected] -Sarah.
Click to expand...

Is the PST file on a CD? Copy it to your hard drive and remove the read-only
file attribute in its properties in Explorer. Then try to open it using file
| open .... in Outlook.
 
S

Sarah.

Yes, I copied it to my hard drive and there is no read-only file attribute.
I checked once again anyhow and tried to open it. The error message reads:
"The file C:\Documents and Settings\Momma\Desktop\Outlook.pst is not a
personal folders file"

Am I hooped here?
 
L

Lanwench [MVP - Exchange]

Sarah. said:
Yes, I copied it to my hard drive and there is no read-only file
attribute. I checked once again anyhow and tried to open it. The
error message reads: "The file C:\Documents and
Settings\Momma\Desktop\Outlook.pst is not a personal folders file"
Click to expand...

Hmm. Make a backup copy of the PST file and find scanpst.exe on your hard
drive & run it against the original to see if it can recover anything...
You probably want to start making regular backups of all your data in the
future :(
 
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