lost e-mails

[prmac]

I have a AMD K-6, yea I know-it's a dinosaur but up here in the Great White North where there is no high speed it gets me by. I have been having a lot of trouble with the computer in the last weeks. I don't know if I got a virus or the machine is just getting sick with age. I ran virus scans and found nothing and ran Norton diagnostics and haven't come up with anything but through determination I got the thing up and running again (it wouldn't boot at all). There are still problems to work out- I get Floppy disk(s) fail (40) errors when I boot and though I close properly at the end of a session, every time I boot anew I get the Microsoft scan program saying I didn't shut down correctly but that is for later.
My urgent concern is that all my Inbox messages have disappeared. I checked the view settings, and all the other boxes but the messages are gone. Yesterday, numerous times, I was unable to open my Outlook express. I was getting error messages and Outlook closed itself. I am running Windows 98. I tried a retrieval through Norton of Email but nothing came up. As there are addresses I need from these messages, help is too small a word for my panic.
Any suggestions on how or if these messages are retrievable.

P.S. When I tried to preview this post before I submitted it, I was closed out of the site.

Paul

[glc]

Search your hard drive for *.dbx, see if your mail folders are still there. They will be in a Outlook Express folder under an Identity folder.

[prmac]

Thanks GLC,

To clarify, I didn't actually lose the INBOX folder. When I opened it (with start-up) the INBOX folder was missing all its files.
I did a Norton scan of *.dbx and numerous files show. When I try to recover one I get an error message; unable to overwrite the existing INBOX.dbx.
There is nothing in my INBOX folder now, so overwriting would be okay?????

[glc]

How many different inbox.dbx files did you find? What are the filesizes? What other .dbx files did you find? There should be sent items.dbx, outbox.dbx, deleted items.dbx, and maybe some more, corresponding to your folder structure - and a set for every identity in OE.

Use the standard Windows search/find tool, not Norton, to begin with. Let us know what you find with that first. Then use Norton to search for deleted .dbx files and let's compare names and filesizes.

[prmac]

glc,

Here are the results of the searches as per your instructions.



In Windows Explorer when searching for *.DBX files I get a file named folder, all the outlook folders including Inbox as well as several other folders including Offline, pop3uidl, loading printing...
The Inbox file is 137KB.
When recovering files matching my criteria (*.dbx) in Norton Unerase Wizard in C: drive, I get 22 Inbox files, 4 folder files and 1 Outbox files. The inbox files range from 72.9KB to 2.33MB and are deleted between 08/21/06 and 08/27/06. When trying to recover the oldest file, the box asks if I want to overwrite the current file/ When I chose yes I get the unable to overwrite existing INBOX.dbx error.

Paul

[glc]

137kb is an empty inbox. Try the 2.33mb one, if it won't overwrite, undelete it to an alternate location then import it back into OE using the import/export wizard, import from an OE store directory. You can do the same thing with any of the .dbx files.