Outlook causes drive to crash.. Help desperately required please 1

[Kutter]

I have one WEIRD problem folks...

All I can say about it is that somehow Outlook is crashing a hard drive!

I know, I know! I am a PC engineer of 20+ years, there is NO WAY this can happen.. But let me assure you it IS happening. Heres the details.

Typically its the close to home computer thats doing this, my wifes business computer. She is pretty savy herself and backs all her work up to Dropbox (as she works) she also has the relevant PST files from outlook on the D: drive of her PC. The D: drive has one folder.. A dropbox folder that backs up.. as she works.

A while back now she started to notice a crash when she first tries to read her emails. The computer says 'Outlook not responding' and over time we have noticed that this is because the D: drive 'drops' from existence.

Faulty drive? Yep, my first guess, so wanting a quicker transfer rate for Photoshop and the like anyway, we bought her a brand new SSD drive. Copied all the dropbox info over and off she went again (incidentally with a new install of windows 7 Ultimate because it was about time we did that too.)

New formated C: drive, nstall of Windows 7 Ultimate, install of Adobe and Office (both cloud versions. Monthly sub)

Today, the same thing happened. D: drive dropped from existence, Outlook crashed in it's usual way.

Now.. Before everyone jumps to the conclusion that this is some kind of hardware issue...

My wife can use her PC for entire days without it going wrong, she has done in fact, as she often deals with important emails before she goes to work, and again when she comes home (she is a designer). As long as she doesnt open Outlook in the day the D: drive behaves perfectly, no issues whatsoever. Then 'randomly' (it doesnt happen every day) when she has Outlook open, the crash happens.

As you can imagine, I'm, pretty stumped here... Could really use some help.

Thanks in advance,

Kutter

 

[goombawaho]

Did you run SCANPST as recommended? Make a backup copy yourself or make backup when SCANPST offers to do so.

"Living tomorrow is everyone's sorrow.
Modern man's daydreams have turned into nightmares.

 

[edfair]

I would move the .pst to the c: drive for testing, you can copy it to the D: for backup to dropbox when needed. That is likely to help determine if it is outlook causing the problem or whether the operating system (or hardware) has the problem. If this is an intermittent hardware dropout it should still happen, just more intermittent since the d: would be used less in this configuration.



Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[cdogg]

Goom,
Creating a new temporary PST and unlinking the current PST for now will tell us if the current PST is the issue. Once we narrow that down, then trying options like SCANPST would be worth the time invested. The concern here is that the tools available to repair them are not always successful, so it's better to start fresh first as a test.

Kutter,
I forgot to mention that in the process of testing a new PST, you should remove any reference to the old PST from Outlook. We don't want Outlook accessing it during the test.