outlook.ost file

[Ian]

I use a laptop with outlook xp on an exchange server at
my office. the exchange server crashed due to a hard
drive failure...all data lost.
after the repairs and the reinstallation of the exchange
server software they had to create mail accounts for the
users because of the lost data files.
even though they recreated my account using the same user
name as before my outlook program will not open the
outlook.ost file located on my hard drive. the error
message states that the outlook.ost file was created for
a different user and cannot be opened.
does anyone know how i can work around this? I am losing
a whole lot of data otherwise!!!!
Thanks
Ian

 

[greg mansius [MSFT]]

Ian,

When a mailbox is recreated the underlying GUID of the mailbox will not
match the GUID stored in your Outlook profile. So, Outlook will
automatically create a new .ost file for you the first time you connect to
your new mailbox.

In this scenario, the only way to recover the .ost data would have been to
NOT connect to the new mailbox but to work Offline one more time. When you
are working offline you can export your "mailbox" (which is really the .ost
file) to a .pst file. Then, after connecting to your new mailbox you could
have imported the data from the .pst file. Unfortunately, if you have
already connected to your new mailbox there's no way I know to get access to
the .ost file.