PST File Wiped

[Guest]

I'm using OL2002 sp3 w/WinXP Pro sp1. My PST file was apparently
overwritten/erased somehow; left the file name and location but removed all
data (I confirmed nothing in the file). This occurred when doing nothing more
than opening Outlook; rec'd "unable to start processing services....pst is
not a personal folders file" message. I realize the data is gone forever but
do have a relatively recent back-up.

Posts indicate I'm not the first one this has happened to, and am asking for
any thoughts on how this file could be wiped clean without any warning.
Thanks in advance for any insight you might have.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Hard drive corruption would be one possible cause. Run scandisk.exe or another disk utility and alternate it with Scanpst.exe 3-4 times to try to recover data from the pst file.

 

[L Henry Boyd]

Is there an epidmic of this going around? I lost my Archive.pst yesterday
as well.
(and yah I know I should have been doing backups)

win2kpro w/ outlook 2002/ NTFS file system

file disappeared, HD free space went up
folder settings set to show hidden files
global search of all files over 50 meg turns up no unexplained files
Norton AV 2005 with current DAT file scan turns up nothing
chkdsk shows HD to be fine, no bad sectors/lost chains etc
using an unerase program turns up nothing

Any ideas, or thoughts?

Henry Boyd


Hard drive corruption would be one possible cause. Run scandisk.exe or
another disk utility and alternate it with Scanpst.exe 3-4 times to try to
recover data from the pst file.

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

When and how did you notice that the file had disappeared? Before you searched, did you change your settings in Windows Explorer to show hidden files and folders?

 

[L Henry Boyd]

Computer is a notebook kept on a docking station and is left on with Outlook
up. The morning the file went missing I came in, and went through my
overnight emails. Because I was going to a client's office, I shut the
thing down and took it to the clients. There I used it to do some stuff in
excel and Word. When my meeting was done I returned to my office, put the
machine on the docking station started w2k up and then opened Outlook. It
was at that point that the unable to open file error message popped up.

Since I had only just created the archive a couple weeks ago, I knew this
was wrong so I opened up explorer and noticed the 100 meg or so increase in
disk free space. As for the show hidden files folder settings that is
always on, I just double checked it. When I couldn't find it I did a file
search of the whole harddrive for *.* files greater than 50 meg to see if
the archive.pst had been moved, or even copied to a different name

I then went and ran a full Norton AV scan, that found no viral infections.

Using another computer, I downloaded three different unerase programs. I
ran each of these and could not find a deleted archive.pst. Working on the
file size angle again I did find a 120 meg adobe acrobat file URllists that
I recovered to a network drive, hoping that it was a rename then delete
trick. after re-naming the file on the network drive I ran scanpst on it a
number of times and that converts it to a pst file that is still 120 meg but
has no entries. So I a assuming scanpst will make just about anything into
a pst given enough repetitions.

I had only just created the archive.pst by turning on the autoarchive
function. could some incorrect setting in the autoarchive process have
flushed the file?

Thanks
Henry Boyd

When and how did you notice that the file had disappeared? Before you
searched, did you change your settings in Windows Explorer to show hidden
files and folders?

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Nothing in Outlook would have deleted the file. I can offer no explanation for why it might have disappeared, but Outlook itself has no functionality for deleting PST files.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of
Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers