Upgraded to XP Pro and lost email from Office 2000

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Guest

Hello,

I recently upgraded a pc to XP Pro from Win 98. I did not format the hard
drive, and I have all the pre-install files still on the HDD. However, I
cannot find the pre-install office 2000 outloook pst file that contains
extremely important data. Is it possible that it is saved in a different
format than .pst? I have searched the entire drive including hidden and
system folders for *.pst. Please Help!

Thanks.
 
Windows XP considers .pst files to be system files and hide them by default.
Open Windows Explorer, and choose Tools, Folder Options.
On the View tab, select "Show hidden files and folders."
After you close the dialog box, you should be able to see the .pst file in the folder.
If you know where the .pst file resides, you can move it, back it up, or copy it to a
new machine when you upgrade. However, before you perform any of these operations,
you must shut down Outlook.

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows - Shell/User
Microsoft Community Newsgroups
news://msnews.microsoft.com/

---------------------------------------------------------------------------­----------------

:

| Hello,
|
| I recently upgraded a pc to XP Pro from Win 98. I did not format the hard
| drive, and I have all the pre-install files still on the HDD. However, I
| cannot find the pre-install office 2000 outloook pst file that contains
| extremely important data. Is it possible that it is saved in a different
| format than .pst? I have searched the entire drive including hidden and
| system folders for *.pst. Please Help!
|
| Thanks.
 
I already searched hidden files and folders with no luck. Is it possible
that it was saved in a different format than a pst file?
 
Winxp does nothing to pst files, They are from two different apps.
In any o/s upgrade it is reccommended that you backup data, apart from the
fact that any important data should be backed up in any case
 
The pst files are still missing though. Could they have been changed to .bak
files or something similar?
 
It all depends on which setup of Windows was configured before the upgrade.

For example, take Win 98 SE, and depending on which version of Internet
Explorer was installed and also from which version of Internet Explorer did
you originally start from to get to this point, the settings for such things
as user accounts where established and are located in different areas
depending on which version configuration ended up on your computer. Whoosh

You see at the end of 98 life cycle, user accounts started appearing and
were in different areas depending on how 98 was configured by the way I
referred to earlier.

This is just a guess, but I guess what happened is that your pst file was in
a user account on your hard drive and the user account was replace with the
XP user account system and the old account was deleted upon installation. It
did not set out to delete pst files, it deleted the folder account that they
resided in.

Since you performed a *.pst search of hidden and system files and did not
find it,
more than likely it is gone.

That is why they always say perform a backup before doing anything,
especially soimething major and upgrading an OS fits that bill.

Now I do not remember this for sure or not, it has been a while, but since
you performed an upgrade and not a format, they may have a uninstall XP
feature in XP control panel and return it back to 98. Some previous upgrade
version of Windows had this feature, but I do not know if this would be the
case for you and I also do not know if it would restore that file. It could.

Hope this helps
Michael Wayne
 
by default the pst file is named outlook.pst and the archive archive.pst so
search for outlook.* etc
 
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