Contacts lost, toolbars disappear

  • Thread starter Thread starter Brian Smither
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Brian Smither

I have a client who lives and breaths through Outlook 2000 (SP1 but not
sure) running in Internet Only mode on Win2K/SP2/NTFS.

There's plenty of space and horsepower to do what she needs to do. The
..pst file is 1.33GB.

Today she calls me and says that all contacts in the main Contacts folder
- of which there are about 500 - after the middle of the A's are just not
there anymore, leaving a few dozen. Three subfolders within Contacts
apparently have all contacts intact.

I've SCANDISK'd and SCANPST'd. SCANPST (only ran it once) reported a few
minor errors - told it make a backup before repairing - but no joy.

Outlook 2000 has also misbehaved once before last week: the Standard
toolbar got switched off. Today, the Standard toolbar of the message
viewer window somehow got switched off.

(Norton Disk Doctor reports Disk Optimization at 45% - don't know if
that's a problem.)

I'm going to fetch some of the special tools mentioned at Slipstick and
see what they can do.
 
I'm going to fetch some of the special tools mentioned at Slipstick
and see what they can do.
Click to expand...

Ran the trial of Ontrack EasyRecovery Pro 6.04 and it reported (er,
'recovered') 30 contacts from the Contacts folder. That's how many I can
already see. Where'd the other several hundred go?

From some other experiments with EasyRecovery, even Shifted-Deleted items
come back. So if my client had somehow managed to select 99.9% of all
contacts and Shft-Del'd them, EasyRecovery should have pulled them back.

I'm extremely confident that my client didn't compact and repair the PST
file. (My experiments show that compacting the PST file *definitely*
deletes deleted items.)

Would SCANPST unduly affect EasyRecovery's ability to find and recover
'hidden' contacts?
 
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