How to recover Outlook contacts from bare drive?

S

SVT4ME

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 2, 2006
Messages
221
Before I built a new machine for a friend, I grabbed his personal folders in .pst form and backed them up to his thumbdrive. Got his new PC up and running (new everything), installed Office 2003, and configured his Outlook. Imported his personal folders and all his mail is there. Awesome. The problem is that his contacts are not. They are still on the old drive. I cannot for the life of me find them. I have done searches for *.pst, .*.pab, *.wab, and CANNOT find his damn contacts, and he had a TON of them. Googled for a bit, but can't seem to find what I'm looking for. Worst case scenario is that I put his old PC back together and do a proper export to CSV. Any other options?

Thanks guys.
 
did you "import" the new PST file? If so, try opening the PST (instead of import) so its in the folders list and see if you can get them from there. I had a similar problem with a co-workers computer when we went from individual Outlook 2000 PST's to 2003 w/ exchange. Manually copy the contacts over then you can close the old PST.
 
Did you copy the .pst, or export the .pst data in Outlook? If you exported, maybe you missed the subfolders option. If you copied, maybe he had other .pst files you missed? Maybe he was running more than 1 .pst from some non default location. Only things I can think of at the moment. Good luck, I hope you don't have to put the old one back together,
 
Sounds like you breezed through the export process without checking what options you were picking. You should be able to grab the old .pst file off his old drive and import just the contacts from it, or import all of it, choosing not to allow duplicate info. Using the .csv method is definitely not the "proper" method. It was a simple point of choosing the entire collection of folders, and not the default of only the inbox.
 
Well I searched his drive for .PST and brought the 3 it found in (imported Archive, Outlook, and Outlook2.pst). No contacts in any of them. I was told to look for .nk2 files in his profile so I'll go that route. And I totally admit I rushed it. This was supposed to be a repair install for new hardware and turned into a full blown format and reinstall along with his proprietary software. His mail was the last thing I did before gutting the rig and setting him up on the new stuff. I won't forget next time.
 
Here is what I do.
After installing and configuring outlook I close it down and replace the newly created Outlook.pst with the old one and boot up outlook. Everything should be restored.
 
The nk2 files are only a list of what populates the To field, for example, when you start typing in an address. What about finding any .ost files?
 
DeaconFrost said:
The nk2 files are only a list of what populates the To field, for example, when you start typing in an address. What about finding any .ost files?
Click to expand...


He pretty much lived on autocomplete, so it would help. No .OST files either. I'm still confused as to where his addresses went. I pulled his entire .PST file (300 megs or so) from his old drive, but still no addresses. I can see if I would have exported it without including them, but I'm browsing the drive and copying his original .PST. Freakyness.
 
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