asked on

Outlook 2000 *.pst file missing

I was working on my laptop in Outlook 2000 when the application "crashed". (The application generaged a "Not Responding" message and when I clicked "OK", Outlook closed. When I reopened the application, an error message warned, "Personal Folders missing, select location for new personal folder file."

I connect to corporate mail via cable modem/vpn tunnel. I connect to e-mail services via IMAP. I then save mail, contacts and calendar events locally in a *.pst file. The *.pst file was quite large - 500 MB.

I closed the application and rebooted. I again received the same error message. I have manually searched the local drive (including hidden files) and I cannot find any evidence of the file.

Has anyone ever experienced this before? If so, will it be possible for me to find my old *.pst file?

Thanks!

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

eddie5659

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

darrellblackhawk

The size limit is 2GB.

The crash may have erased the file or you may have been bitten by a real nasty virus.

If you weren't bitten by un-invited viral guests, the pst may still exist - just in an erased state.

You'll probably have to use an unerase tool (I use Symantec's Norton Disk Tools) to locate erased files.

I'd stop adding any more files to the computer until you've done this, otherwise continuing to run apps will overwrite the space the the pst is taking up. If you've been using the computer for other applications it may be already too late.

Also, if you don't have an unerase tool already on the disk you don't want to install it, but run it from the CDROM.

The standard location for the pst is C:\WINDOWS\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook if your laptop
is running Win98, but it could be in any number of locations based on a number of factors.

Darrell

P.S. Hate to state the obvious... Backups happen!

"It's not if - it's when!"

lcvajda

ASKER

Hi Eddie, thanks for your help. I am running Windows 2000 Pro. w/ Outlook 2000. Scanreg /restore doesn't seem to appear anywhere in Windows 2K... I think I probably exceeded the 2GB limit, although when I backed up the file in November, the size was only 900MB. (I don't mean "only" - I'm just puzzled as to how the pst file could have doubled in a month.)

Thanks again, and if you have any other suggestions, feel free to let me know.

The_Saint

This is very strange, I manage about 200 PCs, and I have lots of problems with .pst file, but they never disapear as a result of a crash.

I sugest you look for it again, you mentioned that you looked for hidden files, try system files too, look for outlook.pst, *.pst, *.ps*, outlook.* ?outlook*.*

Do you know the original name of the file?

SMB1022

I have run into this a few times. In each case, the pst file was near the 2GB size and Outlook locked up as users were moving items to it to put it over the threshold. When Outlook came back up, it reported it couldn't find the pst any longer. This was because it had been marked as a system file and hidden. What clued us in was running OnTrack's SystemSuite to try and search for erased/deleted files. It found an outlook.pst, and restored it as _utlook.pst. When we attempted to rename it to outlook.pst, an error popped up that there was already a file by that name. Looking at the View options, Show all hidden files was selected, but so was Hide protected operating system files. After unchecking this option, it immediately popped up in a search window with the 2GB size and we were able to run utilities against it.