Losing Contacts - Completely!

[Doug Toombs]

(apologies for cross-post into Outlook & E2K groups - I'm at a loss
for where this one falls!)

Greetings all...

I see that there's a number of MVPs and other talented individuals
floating around here, so I'm hoping that someone can help me with a
rather odd situation we're experiencing.

We have users on a clustered E2K server that are losing their contacts
list - the *entire* list - at random times. We've not been able to
nail down any specific patterns yet, other than the fact that so far
they all seem to be Palm users. The list is absolutely gone, clicking
on the contacts folder within Outlook gives the error message "unable
to display folder". Attempting to add a new contact will also fail.
We've gone so far as to use MDBVU32 to actually attach to the Exchange
database via native MAPI calls and look for what's left. Nothing is
there anymore; even attempting to delete the contacts list via MDBVU32
will fail. After the user experiences this problem we have tried
starting Outlook with the /CleanFreeBusy, /resetfolders, and
/cleanviews options with no effect. To remedy the situation we
actually have to delete the user in Exchange and recreate them in
order for everything to return to normal.

The E2K cluster is running Service Pack 3, and the desktop clients are
running Outlook 2000 SR1 (build 3821). Any thoughts for additional
paths we can start looking into?


Thanks in advance,

-Douglas Toombs

 

[Rich Matheisen [MVP]]

(e-mail address removed) (Doug Toombs) wrote:

[ snip ]

The E2K cluster is running Service Pack 3, and the desktop clients are
running Outlook 2000 SR1 (build 3821). Any thoughts for additional
paths we can start looking into?

It sure sounds like the folder (or contents) have been "hard deleted"
(never sent to the "Deleted Items" folder).

Try this and see if you can recover the missing stuff:

XADM: How to Recover Items That Do Not Touch the Deleted Items Folder
{178630}