Thanks. Unfortunately that wouldn't explain the other similar problem. After
I (re)installed xp and office xp on the desktop, I lost the same 2mos of
emails when I tried to retrieve the original data on the hard drive with
Outlook 2003 and was prompted to run the inbox repair tool. Any other ideas?

"DL" wrote:

You cannot access a pst located on a cd.
Copy to hd (any location) remove read only flag, then in OL File/open and
browse to location.
If it cannot be opened, and after running repair tool on it, there are still
problems, then likely the pst on the cd is corrupt.
Probably caused by using the Export option for the origonal pst rather than
a simple copy

"tom" wrote in message
...
Short Version: After trying to access a .pst file from a cd, outlook 2003
asked me to scan the file with the inbox repair tool. Now all email from
January 20, 06 -March 23, 06 has disappeared. Everything else, files and
folders back to 1996 is all there apparently. [I also now have two
personal
folders which I will try to deal with later.] Have I lost those sent and
received emails for good?

Long version: After discovering a trojan in my old desktop, I backed up
everything onto cd's. I have scanned and rescanned everything for viruses.
I copied the old outlook (ol2000, I think) files onto the disks as .pst
files. When I tried to access them with Outlook 2003 on my new laptop, I
got
an error asking me to run the scanpst.exe, which I did. The file was only
about 600,000 bytes.

Then, after installing xp and office xp on the old desktop, I tried to
retrieve the same outlook data directly from the old location on the hard
drive and was asked to do the same repair. Now the files on both
computers
no longer have those crucial months of emails. I do still have 2 copies
of
the unadulterated cd's, though.