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General discussion

Recovering Outlook files after re-installing Vista

Jul 31, 2007 5:29PM PDT

Due to the seemingly common "Your product key is invalid" error condition I could not log on to Windows. After trying various ways to correct the error condition we gave up. I was told to re-install Windows Vista on my Dell Inspiron laptop (model E1405). Dell techs guessed there was a corrupted file in Windows or the product key may have been "stolen." So to make a long story short, first I backed up all my data files, but I forgot to backup Outlook files (in MS Office 2003, Student and Teacher Edition). Now that I've re-installed Vista, is there a way to recover the Outlook files? Any info would be most appreciated. Thank you.
Mike Fuller

Discussion is locked

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Do a search for .pst files
Jul 31, 2007 8:42PM PDT

If the hard drive was formatted with the reinstall, the files may be lost. You can try a data recovery program like Recuva and see if it can find them.

http://www.recuva.com/

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Recovering outlook files
Aug 3, 2007 5:40AM PDT

Thanks glb613. Recuva would not find any pst files. I had to buy another data recovery software package that found 23 pst files, but they are all relatively small, like about 3 to 6 kb. They were in a folder called "Lost files" and named "Recovered_PST_1.pst, PST_2.pst", etc. When I try to import them into Outlook I get a message that says "File access denied." I had them saved on a cd, which should not have been a problem, right? Do you suppose this means that the main pst file(s) could not be recovered or were overwritten in the re-installation of Vista? Can anyone help? Thanks.
Mike F.

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Read only...
Aug 3, 2007 4:49PM PDT

Outlook can be a bit finicky, so copy the PST files to your hard drive, select them all, right-click one of them, select Properties, and remove the Read Only attribute, clicking OK to save the changes, then try again.

Hope this helps,
John

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I've anyways had problems
Aug 6, 2007 4:31AM PDT

getting export mail folders to work so if I want to keep an email I just copy and past to a word document and then copy that file to a folder.