Drive letter on Virtual drive is gone

[Ritter197]

My daughter just called me from out of town and said that her folders are
all empty in Outlook Express. She is missing all her incoming, sent mail.

She is sure that it was fine yesterday Dec 23,2004.

So I told her (she is using windows xp,) to use Restore to yesterday.

She tried that and it came up that it could not restore the Virtual F drive
because it was stopped from being on the Restore option.

So she Restore still to the 23rd of Dec. and still her Messages are gone.

I then asked her to try the 22nd and she did that with same result. It
always said it could not restore F drive but otherwise restored
successfully.

Yet - again her messages are not there.

I have 2 questions, Because I never had problems with Restore myself.
HOW can 1 drive be "stopped" from being on the Restore file? How can you
stop or "un-stop" it ? Where?

She did a Virus check with NOD32 and finds no viruses.
She did a Search and Destroy and finds no problems there.

What do you think happened? I am at this time clueless.

 

[Ted Zieglar]

System Restore has nothing to do with e-mail. It neither backs up nor
restores e-mail.

Tell her to open Outlook Express and go to Tools > Options > Maintenance tab

Store Folder button. This will tell her where her messages are located.

Ted Zieglar

 

[Ritter197]

Well, you may be right and I know how you find where E-mails are stored.

I can only say when I have used personally Restore it restored everything to
a previous day, INCLUDING my E-mail.

Now, what do you think about the missing drive?
That really puzzles me. That was her backup partition.

 

[Ted Zieglar]

Where did she get the idea to backup to a virtual drive? Backups belong on a
fixed partition and/or removable media.

Ted Zieglar

 

[Ritter197]

I was wrong. I meant all the time Partitions.Not virtual drives.
Sorry.

 

[Ted Zieglar]

OK then, if I understand you correctly, her message store was located on the
partition she uses for backup, and now the partition is gone.

Well, partitions certainly don't disappear by themselves. They can be
damaged by a virus, or deleted by user inexperience, or hidden, but hiding a
partition requires third party software (Partition Magic, for example.)

Ted Zieglar

 

[Ritter197]

Thanks again. I installed some time ago for her Partition Magic, but she
does not know how to use it and tells me she has not come near it.

She is just now coming to my house and I will review everything you and I
have discussed via the Newsgroup.

Thanks in the meantime.

Karl