Question

HOW DO i CONVERT OLD PALM .DAT FILE TO .ABA FILE... VISTA NOT RECOGNIZING FILES

Asked by: JASMINE_TEA

hI,

I am on Vista machine and I am trying to recover old Palm Data from my palm iiix and data that worked great on palm desktop versions on xp. Now in trying to move my data-- palm desktop 6.x on Vista does not even recognize the .dat file from the old Palm Desktop.  It seems to want only .aba files which don't have the bulk of my data. What is it that I need to do.

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Asked On
2008-07-02 at 17:59:56ID23535570
Tags

PALM

,

PALM DESKTOP

,

6.1

,

PALM DESKTOP ON VISTA

,

Palm Devices

Topics

Handhelds and PDAs

,

Windows Vista

,

WebOS Programming

Participating Experts
3
Points
500
Comments
6

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Answers

 

by: b0lsc0ttPosted on 2008-07-03 at 19:24:43ID: 21930663

Have you tried manually renaming the extension.  The format of the data in the file is the same (according to Palm) so this may work.  Of course the data version may be different and that would be a problem.  Also something may have changed recently, especially with Vista.

Let me know if you have a question about renaming a file's extension.  Make sure you use a copy of the file just to be safe. :)

bol

 

by: JASMINE_TEAPosted on 2008-07-03 at 20:04:01ID: 21930788

I did try doing that and it doesn't seem to recognize the file.  So it doesn't import at all.

 

by: bluelizardPosted on 2008-07-07 at 06:08:45ID: 21944612

hm... apparently, ".dat are current sync data; .bak are backups; .aba are archive backups created when you selected the archive box when deleting the record." (i found this on the net).

so, i guess you're using the functions "File > Open Archive..." or "File > Import...", but these functions are not used to just handle the normal data.  what you probably need to do is this (this is speculating, but it might be worth a try):

1) locate the user directory that holds the palm files, for example, if your user name is "JOEDOE", then you need to find the directory that holds the folder "JOEDOE" (typically, its the directory C:\Program Files\Palm)
2) start palm desktop
3) select "Tools > Options...", tab "General"
4) in the field "Data directory", enter the path found above
5) maybe you need to quit and restart palm desktop now
6) select "Tools > Users..."
7) the user directory should now appear in the list (e.g., "JOEDOE"): select it and click OK
8) now, the data should appear (otherwise, try to restart palm desktop)

HTH


--bluelizard

 

by: stevenb01Posted on 2008-07-16 at 20:23:49ID: 22022113

Having any luck?  If not, here is another method to try:
If you do a search on your hard drive, you can find the .DAT files that Palm Desktop is currently using (probably in a place like (C:\Program Files\Palm\your_hotsyncID).  Once you find the folder(s), just rename the existing .DAT files and copy your old .DAT files to the folders.  Now open Palm Desktop and see if that works.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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