Outlook contacts no-show after import.. ??

guys I'm stumped.

an older Dell laptop that I had kept living for a Lawyer finally croaked, suddenly. The drive is fine, the system is toast. I have a number of small bus accounts and can't recall what version of office/outlook the guy used, so that's part of the problem.
but, found the .pst file intact and saved it off. put in a new WINDOWS 8.1 laptop and of course, the lawyer hates it. Put in Office 2007, imported the old .pst file, and the mail all looks good except the most important part: NO CONTACTS.

I went back and searched the entire drive for *.wab and *.pab files, ... nada. none. [side question: how do I determine which version of Office was on the dead system?]

so... I'm presuming the Contacts should have been somehow embedded in the *.pst file, but not populated. What now??

 

Importing a PST file is always a bad idea; what you should do is load the PST file to a save location on your disk, then open the file with Outlook.

In Outlook 2007: File | Open | Outlook Data File.

P.S. Contacts may reside on a different PST file; make sure you get all PST files from the old HD.

 

Thanks PW for responding to this.

I figured out last Friday that the old data had two pst files. Not entirely sure how it got that way - I recall a couple of callouts where mail just stopped for no good reason [Centurylink] and the only way I got around it was to recreate the account fresh. At any rate, once I nuked this new installation and redid Outlook/Office I used both to build the account and it came out fine.

lesson learned.

it does leave one question, which I did not work on 'cause the user needed to get back to work: is there a way to combine those two into one, or is it effectively already done? Visually, they are both showing in outlook, but appear to be identical as to incoming mail and current items.

 

Open both PST files with Outlook, then drag and drop the contents that you want to copy to the other PST. Once it is done, you can close the second PST permanently.