Another .PST File Can't Be Read

[Timboroni]

I went through all of the posts pertaining to "unreadable .pst files" and
didn't see this situation. I was wondering if perhaps someone could shed some
light on this or make a suggestion.

I was running Outlook 2003 on a Win2K PC when the dreaded hard drive crash
occurred. Luckily for me (or so I thought) i had my trusty nightly Robocopy
backup to fall back on. I moved the 400+ Mb mail file to another PC running
Office 2003 under WinXP and was told that the file was not a personal folders
file. DRATS!

I tried Scanpst - and that didn't work - same message. I tried downloading
numerous "repair" programs and none of those worked (even the $249 one!). I
used a Hex editor to view the file because one of the sites I found suggested
altering bytes 7 - 13 to maybe "trick" Scnapst to work, but the file was full
of Hex 00 (is that null?). Now you might say that, perhaps, the last backup
that was made picked up some bad data right before the drive went south, but
there's more to the story.

After fooling around with this for a good while, I came upon a copy of my
mail file from July of last year that I had put on a CD. So I didn't lose
EVERYTHING after all, just about 8 months worth of e-mails. Well, I copied
the file to my hard drive, made sure the READ ONLY attribute was not set, and
tried to open the file: same message! "not a personal folder file". Scanpst
was no help, as was the same for all of the "pay-to-play" packages.

Now, I can see one file not being good, but two? Is it possible that Outlook
runs differently under Win2K than WinXP as far as service packs, etc.? Am I
doing something wrong when either backing up the file or restoring it?

Thanks for your help!

 

[K. Orland]

Try creating a new profile. Don't copy the old profile, create a brand new
one. Then use File > Open to open the old PST.

 

[Roady [MVP]]

And that second copy also consists out of only 00? Then you backed up blank
files.
It's actually very likely that if one backup fails, the other fails too as
it is the same process. If there is something wrong with the process it will
fail every time, computers are very consistent in that.

It might be a hard lesson and I'm not trying to rub it in but; Did you ever
test your backups?

 

[Timboroni]

File => Open gave me the same results.

Thanks.

Try creating a new profile. Don't copy the old profile, create a brand new
one. Then use File > Open to open the old PST.

 

[Timboroni]

I never tested the PST files, but I have on numerous occasions opened other
files (ie. spreadsheets, Word Docs, etc.) without issue. I just assumed
everything was well with all of the files. (I guess we all know what happens
when you "assume"! :->)

Thanks.

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Yep, it's a hard lesson but I've seen my share of horror stories where a
company really lost everything. Not a single bit (no pun intended) of
information could be retrieved.

I think what happened is that Robocopy didn't check if the file was still in
use. If you have Outlook running while making a backup, your backups are
worthless.