Relinking old 'Inbox' and 'Sent Items'

[Blue Max]

When reinstalling Windows Vista, how do we re-link Windows Fax and Scan to
the old incoming and outgoing faxes stored in the old 'Inbox' and 'Sent
Items' folders? After reinstalling we configured the program to the same
folder as before for storing faxes.

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

Explain more clearly what you did and what is not happening that you think
should. State why reinstalling an OS is ever a good idea.

 

[Blue Max]

See inline comments:

Explain more clearly what you did and what is not happening that you think
should.

After re-installing Vista, the user can go to "Fax and Scan > Tools > Fax
Settings ... > Advanced Tab > Fax Archive Section > Move Folder Button" and
relocate the archive for Inbox and Sent items. In our case, the Inbox and
Sent items folders, created by the first insallation, already existed in the
old location. So when we redirected the Fax and Scan archive to the old
location we anticipated that the old faxes, still in their respective
folders, would show up in the 'Inbox' and 'Sent Items' folders of Windows
Fax and Scan. They did not.

State why reinstalling an OS is ever a good idea.

It's a good idea when the 64-bit version of Vista is so problematic that you
must re-install the 32-bit version which, unfortunately, can only be a clean
install!

Thanks for the help.

--
Russ Valentine
[MVP-Outlook]

When reinstalling Windows Vista, how do we re-link Windows Fax and Scan
to the old incoming and outgoing faxes stored in the old 'Inbox' and
'Sent Items' folders? After reinstalling we configured the program to
the same folder as before for storing faxes.

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

You've lost me. If this was a clean install, how could anything from the
first installation remain?
--
Russ Valentine
[MVP-Outlook]

See inline comments:

Explain more clearly what you did and what is not happening that you
think should.

After re-installing Vista, the user can go to "Fax and Scan > Tools > Fax
Settings ... > Advanced Tab > Fax Archive Section > Move Folder Button"
and relocate the archive for Inbox and Sent items. In our case, the Inbox
and Sent items folders, created by the first insallation, already existed
in the old location. So when we redirected the Fax and Scan archive to
the old location we anticipated that the old faxes, still in their
respective folders, would show up in the 'Inbox' and 'Sent Items' folders
of Windows Fax and Scan. They did not.

State why reinstalling an OS is ever a good idea.

It's a good idea when the 64-bit version of Vista is so problematic that
you must re-install the 32-bit version which, unfortunately, can only be a
clean install!

Thanks for the help.

--
Russ Valentine
[MVP-Outlook]

When reinstalling Windows Vista, how do we re-link Windows Fax and Scan
to the old incoming and outgoing faxes stored in the old 'Inbox' and
'Sent Items' folders? After reinstalling we configured the program to
the same folder as before for storing faxes.

 

[Blue Max]

You've lost me. If this was a clean install, how could anything from the
first installation remain?

Simple! Our original fax folders were located on a separate data partition
(Drive E so that they would be automatically backed up. As such, they
were preserved during the clean re-install of Vista, which only overwrites
the primary system partition (Drive C. Of course, we originally had to
redirect Fax and Scan to archive and log faxes on Drive E: (using the menu
illustrated in our last message). So at this point, we are simply trying to
re-establish the original connection between the original fax archives and
the new installation of the Fax and Scan program.

 

[Russ Valentine [MVP-Outlook]]

Simple! to you perhaps, but rather a large amount of information you left
out. Do not require us to be mind readers. Even this post is quite opaque.
WFS cannot pick up fax messages from previous installations in its default
folders.

 

[Guest]

I finally resolved an issue today that sounds similar. I needed to create a
new user account due to apparent corruption in my initial one on Vista
(according to MS Tech Support). I won't go into the details, but once I
fired up Windows Fax and Scan from within my new user account, I could not
see the faxes I'd previously sent. But if I now sent a new fax, that would
of course appear in the Sent Items folder within the program.

I tracked down the actual file locations of all the sent faxes, which was
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\WindowsNT\MSFax\SentItems. In that folder I could
see all the old faxes as well as the new one. So I couldn't figure out why
only the new one was visible from within the program. These files all have
terrifically long names given to them automatically by the software.

Well, I finally took a good look at the characters in the file names, and
noticed that all characters were identical up to a certain point (just past
the last hyphen in the neme), at which point there was a slight difference
between the old faxes and the new. In my case the new fax had "1008$201"
while all the old ones had "1005$201". (Then there was a hex string
following those characters that differed in each case, which were not
suspicious looking.) So anyway, as soon as I changed the "1005" to "1008" in
each file name, suddenly these files would appear when I opened the program
and looked in the Sent Items folder.

So, if you have a bunch of files whose names start something like
"S-1-5-21-7747411-" and on and on, look for the first point where the file
name differs when comparing a fax you are able to see from within Fax and
Scan and others that you aren't able to see. My guess is if you change the
character before the $ in the non-viewable files' names to match the
character in the viewable ones, all will be well.

Does this help?

 

[Guest]

A bit of further information: The MS Tech Support person who had been trying
to help me on this issue earlier wrote back to me. (I'd previously written
with the solution I'd found regarding the file name.) Here's part of what
he/she said (though I've removed some of my id numbers):

"For your information, the whole string “S-1-5-21-[other numbers shown
here]-1005†is the profile ID for your user account. Each number of the
string can be different among different user accounts, due to the different
account types, profile types and order.

We can get a list of all the profile IDs from the following registry
location. We can open Registry by typing regedit.exe in the search bar and
press Enter.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/ProfileList
"

Interesting!