I did a "refresh" of XP Home on a desktop ... and forgot to backup-export
the contacts, settings, etc. in Outlook 2K.

The contacts were visible and email could be received using OL ... but
sending would not work ... some error about a missing address book would
always come up.

Then disaster struck: The motherboard apparently had been flakey and now it
does not not boot ... nor recognize the existance of the HDD ... or even
another (test) HDD. This is at the BIOS level.

Putting the HDD on another PC as slave, will let one look at the contents of
the HDD. I did a search on the whole drive for *.pst and came up with
nothing. What does this indicate? Does it sound hopeless in terms of
recovering the contacts?

Thanks !

-RS-

PST files are hidden files. Just find it, copy it, and use it in a new
Outlook profile. The data is probably fine. You only disrupted the Outlook
Address Book connection, not your actual data.
--
Russ Valentine
[MVP-Outlook]
"RS" wrote in message
...
I did a "refresh" of XP Home on a desktop ... and forgot to backup-export
the contacts, settings, etc. in Outlook 2K.

The contacts were visible and email could be received using OL ... but
sending would not work ... some error about a missing address book would
always come up.

Then disaster struck: The motherboard apparently had been flakey and now
it
does not not boot ... nor recognize the existance of the HDD ... or even
another (test) HDD. This is at the BIOS level.

Putting the HDD on another PC as slave, will let one look at the contents
of
the HDD. I did a search on the whole drive for *.pst and came up with
nothing. What does this indicate? Does it sound hopeless in terms of
recovering the contacts?

Thanks !

-RS-