Hi, I’m having a few problems recovering my emails from a crashed hard disk on my pc… I can access the crashed drive by plugging it directly into my laptop though the usb. I located the outlook.pst and copied directly to the desktop of my laptop, but it’s not picking the file up – just comes up blank. I also tried searching for the existing outlook.pst file on the same latop but xp is not picking that one up either…. For importing the file I’m doing: outlook/file/import and export/import from another file or program/personal folder file (.pst)/browse/desktop/ files of type: personal….. but no joy…. The file is not read only, and not hidden.. Any ideas?

Very grateful for any help.

contact computer solutions. they have successfully done numeroud HD recoveries via some specialized tools. At least talk to them and see what they say.

Crashed in what way?

HDD issues or just OS won't boot?

Are you using the same (or newer) version of LookOut?
Are there other PST's? (Might be using the wrong one).

If the size of the PST looks correct, try doing a repair on a COPY.
NB PST files start to corrupt at >1G+-. When they get to 2G they definitely corrupt, as they get truncated.

I can take a look if you bring to our office.

Yes, best to keep them small. I think keeping under 0.5G is best and definitely under 1G.

If the PST looks about the correct size you can try the scanpst.exe tool. It is installed with Office automatically. It installs in different locations depending on the version so you may need to search for it.

The problem may be due to the corruption of pst file or over sized 2 Gb Pst file size limit. You can use Inbox repair tool to repair your corrupted file.
To run Inbox repair tool you have to locate pst repair file. The pst repair file by default is located at:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\Mapi\1033\
Or
C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033

For outlook 2007 scanpst.exe file is located at:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12

For more information visit
http://repair-pst.blogspot.com/

If your pst file is badly corrupted in this situation you can use outlook pst repair software.
The pst recovery software is easy to use and provides powerful recovery solution. You can download the free demo version from the site
http://www.repair-outlook-pst.com/
demo version you can preview 5 e-mails, 20% of contacts and calendar entries from which you can evaluated the efficiency & recovery capability of the software.

Hi,

If necessary, you can try a tool called Advanced Outlook Repair to repair your PST file. It is a powerful tool to recover messages, folders and other objects from corrupt or damaged Microsoft Outlook PST files.

Detailed information about Advanced Outlook Repair can be found at http://www.datanumen.com/aor/

And you can also download a free demo version at http://www.datanumen.com/aor/aor.exe

Alan

i'm facing a similar problem. The hard disk in my laptop crashed. I've already replaced it with a new one. Now i need to try and retrieve as much data possible from the disk that has crashed. (already sent a mail to computer solutions and awaiting their reply) In the mean while any suggestions?

get an external hard drive encasing and put your old hard drive in there. Connect it to your working computer via USB and see if it is recognized. It may run very slow so give it some time to think. If it works, transfer as everything you want to your laptop (quickly!).

If it doesn't work at all and you *really* need the data contact a professional data recovery place or a friend who knows how to use data recovery tools. Be prepared to potentially pay top dollar if it is really borked.

As people have suggested above, if your data is REALLY important to you then you should get someone who knows what they are doing to look at it directly BEFORE you try it yourself with various programs which may corrupt or damage your data further. if it is a simple matter of finding the right location of a file or copying from one place to another then fine but if you have to run soem program over it and you don't know what to do if it fails then you only have yourself to blame.

thanks for your replies. I've already put the old drive into the external hard drive encasing and connected it to a healthy computer. However it's unable to read the data. Tried doing chdsk on the same (as suggested in a couple of forums), however the same did not work. So now i'm hoping that some experts in Shanghai might read this and offer their services.

Whoever reads that - LEARN from this - do not use friggin' OUTLOOK ffs ! It is extremely stupid piece of software, storing everything in one proprietary-format file. Use anything else which stores emails separately, where every email has it's own .msg file

I am using PST with the size of 4.3 G. Will split as soon as I can to avoid such disasters. Lessons Learned!

ost and pst should be ok for up to 20GB in outlook 2007.

my pst file is 7GB and archive pst is 4GB, no problems that I know of... yet

Kernel for Outlook PST repair uses quick algorithms to search and restore lost or deleted mails and hence it is fast, simple and easy to use. Along with recovering emails and other data, you can easily recover all the deleted items also. Try PST recovery with the free evaluation version which previews all the recoverable items but save them with the full version.

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