Here is the situation... A friend of mine was having hardware issues on an
ailing laptop drive... (The drive is still good, fully accessible) So bought
a new drive and reinstalled the XP OS and OUTLOOK 2003. We thought we had
backed up the entire .pst file but upon restoration it turned out to only be
the SENT Folder.

But just before this we mounted the ailing laptop drive in a SLAVE mode,
took ownership of the My Documents folder and started moving ".doc" files to
the new system....

So now back to the Outlook 2003 situation, we thought we'd just put the old
drive back in the same laptop and just relaunch OUTLOOK and do a proper
backup of the .pst file, but upon windows startup it seems to have created a
brand new user /account name. it went from "yourname" to "yourname-1204"
something to that effect. "yourname" being the original owner/folder.

We are unable to browse, the orignal owner without taking ownership of the
folder.

Now once we tried to launch outlook 2003 from the old drive under the newly
created account it crashes.

There is a couple years of Valuable financial emails, lost on the drive.. We
really need help, they are unable to find there last dated pst backup if
there was one at all?

This could be very detrimental to their business hence the severity of this.

Our one saving grace we think is that we still have the drive and it is
fully functional/readable/writeable

I've searched for a .pst file to no avail but will again when I go out there
tomorrow?

We need help!

Thanks in advance

email me directly if needed

One last note: The drive is at friends house over an hour away... When I did
the search for the .pst file it was through remote assistance, and yes all
files/folders were unhidden. I'm just hoping some were hidden because I was
using remote desktop. I'm heading out to the house to do a search there. I'm
going to the old drive so i can bring it back with me and try and work on it
here if I get stumped.

Rav

One other thing this was a POP3 type account.

You simply need to copy any *.pst files from your old drive (Take ownership
of the folder again) and locate them in eg the Documents folder, then within
OL open the required data file.
By default the primary data file is outlook.pst. Do NOT overwrite any
existing data file by copying them to the default location.
PS Important financial information & no backups?

"Ravell" wrote in message
...
One other thing this was a POP3 type account.

In edition
http://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/backupandrestore.htm

"Ravell" wrote in message
...
One other thing this was a POP3 type account.