HELP! All email addresses and old mail lost

My Compaq Presario "budget-special" ran slower and slower until it died and refused to load XP at all. A local fella looked at it, said it had problems with the formatting on the HD, fixed it so it does now work (hence me typing this) but lost all the outlook 6 data, explorer 7 favorites folders etc - but fortunately we didn't lose all the family pics of our toddlers - phew!

I've managed to set up the email etc up but we've both lost huge amounts of important business and professional emails, together with our address book full of old "only-contactable-via-email" people...

The expert has had another look at our machine, but says all the old data's gone - My gut feeling is he couldn't be bothered to look at it for free, so am hoping to pick some brains here - any useful software out there? - preferably freeware, as it's already cost us a fortune to get to this point.

I renovate houses for a living, so my sort of RAM's tend to be hydrolic - i.e. please don't make it too complicated!

 

Cheers, many thanks for that info.

Guess I'm stuffed...:cry

 

The facts here seem contradictory. If the hard drive was, indeed, formatted, everything on the hard drive was erased. This would include photos. Yet, you say you still have your photos. So, clearly, we don't have all the facts here, or we don't have the facts straight.

Did you backup your photos on external media before the "local fella" worked on your hard drive?

 

Hi,

He told me that there was a problem with the formatting on the hard drive. No external back up was used for any data, it's still sitting on the HD.

This is his list of works carried out, as typed on his invoice - " Investigating problem loading Windows XP; checking hard disk for formatting and partitioning errors - correcting as found; checking hard disk integrity - OK; completing Windows recovery process; re-configuring paging file settings; scanning Windows for configuration errors - 13 found and resolved; updating AVG Anti-Virus to v8; updating Spybot Anti-spyware to v1.6; scanning system for Spyware - 10 found and removed"

After reading threads on here, I 've found a file called outlook.pst located on the HD which was last modified 2 days before the Big Bang - however, it doesn't show in a folder and I can't seem to import it into Outlook 6. I hoping it's my old address book, and if so, how can I retrieve it.

As ever, many thanks in advance for help

 

Well, that sheds more light on the situation here. As I understand what you just posted, the repair guy did not format your hard drive. As I previously stated, "If the hard drive was, indeed, formatted, everything on the hard drive was erased."

"checking hard disk for formatting and partitioning errors" does not, in my opinion, indicate he formatted your hard drive. IOW, checking for formatting errors does not mean the same thing as formatting the HD. And clearly, he did not format your HD because your photos are still on it, unless he backed up the photo files and perhaps some other files, formatted the HD and reinstalled Windows, then restored your photos. And, the phrase "completing Windows recovery process" is vague. Exactly what does that mean?

Did he ask you what important files you had on your computer you did not want to lose if formatting, i.e. erasing, the HD was necessary? I think a phone call to clarify whether he actually formatted the HD would be justified. And, if he did, did he back up OE messages before formatting?

outlook.pst is an Outlook file, not an Outlook Express file. There is no such thing as "Outlook 6". There is Outlook Express 6. If you used Outlook Express for all email, as you said in your original post, your email is in .dbx files. But, apprarently, you also have Outlook, part of Microsoft Office, installed. Is that correct? It must be, otherwise you would not have an outlook.pst file.

 

I said about the priceless family photos etc, but besides that he just took it away and charged £$£$£$ to make it work again.

He returned it to us and I had to go hunting about trying to see if we still had the photos, documents etc etc and set up OE6 from scratch.

I got him out for a site-visit to look for the missing address book and emails after it was returned, becuase I figured if the family pics were there then the other data should be too.

He came out, tinkered for 15 minutes, declared all was lost and went. Since then, because of yours and past posts I did a simple search for *.dbx and *.wab and everything popped up and has been imported without problem.

I'm grateful to him for making this thing work again, but feel ripped off...

Anyway, one last thing, if I may - does Internet Explorer store the favorites as a type of file, and if so what should I search for?

Many thanks for the help

Chris

 

C:\Documents and Settings\"user name"\Favorites