Cannot open .PST

[Tony]

I copied my .PST from work (at work I use Office 2003)and
tried to import it at home (where I also use Office
2003) - after running the Import Wizard - I get an error
message - "The file <file name> is not a personal folders
file".. But it is!!

Has anyone seen this before??

Help please!

 

[Ben Schorr - OneNote MVP]

If you copied it from work on a CD then you have to copy it from the CD to
the local hard drive and turn off the "Read-only" property.


--
-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr, MVP-OneNote
http://www.thespoke.net/MyBlog/bschorr/MyBlog.aspx
Microsoft OneNote FAQ:
http://home.hawaii.rr.com/schorr/Computers/OneNoteFAQ.htm

**Please post all replies and questions in the newsgroups as I am unable to
respond to direct requests for help.**

 

[Guest]

Thank you for your reply...

I checked that - the .PST is not set for Read Only.

In fact, I also checked the Permissions - just to make
sure I have Full rights to this file.

Any other thoughts?

 

[Brian Tillman]

I copied my .PST from work (at work I use Office 2003)and
tried to import it at home (where I also use Office
2003) - after running the Import Wizard - I get an error
message - "The file <file name> is not a personal folders
file".. But it is!!

Don't try importing. Just use File>Open>Outlook Data File

 

[EricT]

I have exactly the same problem, but in a worse situation : Afte
backing up all data, I reinstalled my pc (WinXP Pro, Office 2003) onl
to find that NONE of the PST that were created using Office 2003 can b
opened on the new system.

The files seem to be encrypted, using a simple HEX viewer shows them t
be all binary zeroes. A test PST created with default settings unde
the newly installed Outlook 2003 looks just the same. It too can not b
opened on a different machine with Outlook 2003, even though it work
fine on the machine that created the file.

My guess is that MS is now encrypting PST files be default and that i
uses data from the pc to create the encryption key so that these file
can only be read on the machine they were created on. Which basicall
seems to indicate that I have just lost 2 months worth of message


Anybody know a workaround for this ? Are there any "recovery" package
that have been updated for Outlook 2003 ? Ontrack's Data recovery pr
can't handle these files yet...

Thanks for your help,

Eri