T
TVC
Can anyone help? My computer has been acting strange for a while and we had
planned to save everything to floppy and then restore it to its factory
settings to eliminate whatever corruption has been caused. But two nights
ago everything went KABLOOEY. I frequently have Outlook Express "not
respond" when trying to click back on my email Inbox after reading the
alt.obituaries newsgroup. This time, as usual, it was taking too long to
show me the email Inbox, so I hit control-Alt-Delete and as usual saw that
it was not responding. So I closed it down, and then as usual, reopened it a
second later. To my HORROR, the 90-odd emails in my Inbox (going back
several months) were GONE. In their place was the Welcome to Microsoft
Outlook Express email that you get when you first get a computer. We have 20
or so
other email folders, and none were affected. The emails were not in the
Deleted folder. Having been through computers corrupting before, I knew to
search for Inbox.dbx, fully expecting the entire 90-emails to be in a long
text file with codes and such. Instead, it was just 137k and that was just
one new e-mail, which had apparently come in while I had been reading the
obituaries. (It seemed to be a legitimate promotion from Northwest
Airlines.)
This means that while I was reading alt.obituaries newsgroup and heard the
email come in,
that ONE email arrived and did NOT vanish with the others during the moment
when Outlook Express went into "not responding" mode.
Having been told in the past that even when you restore a computer to
factory settings and wipe out all information on it, that it's not safe to
give it or throw it away without smashing it to bits, because "even emails
that were deleted are STILL on the hard disk," I am hoping that these emails
indeed ARE somewhere on my computer. If so, can anyone tell me what I need
to find them? We have not turned on that computer since it happened, and the
only usage it had was right after it happened when we tried to locate the
dbx file.
Thanks for any help. If possible, please reply to (e-mail address removed) but I
will try to check this newsgroup also.
planned to save everything to floppy and then restore it to its factory
settings to eliminate whatever corruption has been caused. But two nights
ago everything went KABLOOEY. I frequently have Outlook Express "not
respond" when trying to click back on my email Inbox after reading the
alt.obituaries newsgroup. This time, as usual, it was taking too long to
show me the email Inbox, so I hit control-Alt-Delete and as usual saw that
it was not responding. So I closed it down, and then as usual, reopened it a
second later. To my HORROR, the 90-odd emails in my Inbox (going back
several months) were GONE. In their place was the Welcome to Microsoft
Outlook Express email that you get when you first get a computer. We have 20
or so
other email folders, and none were affected. The emails were not in the
Deleted folder. Having been through computers corrupting before, I knew to
search for Inbox.dbx, fully expecting the entire 90-emails to be in a long
text file with codes and such. Instead, it was just 137k and that was just
one new e-mail, which had apparently come in while I had been reading the
obituaries. (It seemed to be a legitimate promotion from Northwest
Airlines.)
This means that while I was reading alt.obituaries newsgroup and heard the
email come in,
that ONE email arrived and did NOT vanish with the others during the moment
when Outlook Express went into "not responding" mode.
Having been told in the past that even when you restore a computer to
factory settings and wipe out all information on it, that it's not safe to
give it or throw it away without smashing it to bits, because "even emails
that were deleted are STILL on the hard disk," I am hoping that these emails
indeed ARE somewhere on my computer. If so, can anyone tell me what I need
to find them? We have not turned on that computer since it happened, and the
only usage it had was right after it happened when we tried to locate the
dbx file.
Thanks for any help. If possible, please reply to (e-mail address removed) but I
will try to check this newsgroup also.
