*How Can I Find Lost Email*

[lefty78]

A user on my LAN recently had his pc act up in a way I have never witnessed, when he logged on to his domain account (which is the norm, he does not have a local account on his machine) the pc decided that it needed to creat a new SID and user profile. I checked it out and the other one was there, but we cant access it. My dillemma is, before we take any measures further, I need to retrieve all of the mail that was in his inbox and other various saved folders. When I navigate through his profile to get to the outlook exe file, I find it, click it, and get the "set up your new account" window, not his inbox. I have done searches for pst and ost files and have found absolutely nothing at all. If anyone knows what folder they are kept in on the drive, or a way to recover them it would be of great help

 

[datadan]

Are the files "hidden"?
Were the .pab and .pst stored on the network and not on the PC?
Is the computer virus free?
Have you searched for all files modifies in the last x days?
Check the recycle bin, did the user delete their .pst unknowingly?

 

[lefty78]

I set the pc to show all files, so they may be set as hidden, but they show up on screen.
They are stored locally on the pcs hard drive.
The pc is absolutely virus free.
User did not delete the files.

 

[datadan]

If the PST is gone that's bad. I have encounterd a similar problem only 2 times in the last 5 years and could not isolote the cause.

Your only option if the .pst is gone is some sort of disk recovery approach.

http://www.ontrack.com/

Good Luck

 

[kbelski]

Go to a DOS prompt and do a DIR *.pst and DIR *.pab. You may need to do a DIR/ah to show the files with the h attribute. See if the .pab and .pst files are there. I know it sounds weird but I once had a problem where I could not find a file via Windows but was able to find it in DOS.

 

[lefty78]

Thank you both for the responses for the responses. Working in DOS was the answer to this puzzle.