Need help with an Outlook error message

Topic

New Reply

I cannot open Outlook at the moment, I rebooted my computer and for no apparant reason it appeared as follows:
“Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window. The set of folders cannot be opened. The file c:UsersShirleyAppDataLocalMicrosoftOutlookOutlook.pst is not a personal folders file.”

I have tried inserting my original disc and running “repair” but it didn’t do any good.

Can anyone help? Pleeeeease.

Many thanks

Reply | Quote

Replies

See if this helps.

Reply | Quote

Thanks for the try but it didn’t work I’m afraid. I can remove Outlook and start again but I will lose all my contacts. I do have a “C” drive backup on an external hard drive but I don’t know how to pinpoint exactly what I would need to save my contacts or to restore them. I am just sick thinking about all my addresses etc…

Reply | Quote

Thanks for the try but it didn’t work I’m afraid.

I think there was a recent post in another thread saying that ScanPST.exe does not work with with Outlook 2007-2010 files.

If you follow the suggestion above about renaming your existing .pst file to something like Outlook_old.pst, then after opening Outlook, you will see a new blank data file. You can use File > Open > Outlook Data File to open Outlook_old.pst as a second set of personal folders. But if Outlook still cannot open the file, then more drastic repair methods might be needed.

Do you have any backups? Have you ever sync’d Outlook with a mobile device or Gmail, etc.?

Reply | Quote

Uninstalling and installing outlook is unlikely to solve your issue, as the problem is with that specific file. Probably just renaming that file to something else will have Outlook ask you for a new file and offering to create it (at least it does that with Outlook 2010). That would get Outlook started.

You would still have the issue of repairing your existing file. What info, if any, did you get from the repair tool?

Anyway, this page has info on a variety of pst file repair tools, so maybe that can help, hopefully.

Reply | Quote

I’ve found the file but I can’t figure out how to alter it.

Anyway regarding the next point, I have got all my contacts saved on my iPhone 4 but I don’t know how to get them back to Outlook. I’ve got them all saved on an external hard drive but again I don’t know what I’m looking for .

By the way I really appreciate your trying to help me, thankyou so much

Reply | Quote

I’ve found the file but I can’t figure out how to alter it.

Hmmm, is this about the renaming? Usually you can rename any file by right-clicking and choosing Rename and then editing the name. Make sure to preserve the .pst extension if it is displayed.

Anyway regarding the next point, I have got all my contacts saved on my iPhone 4 but I don’t know how to get them back to Outlook. I’ve got them all saved on an external hard drive but again I don’t know what I’m looking for .

I don’t know anything about the iPhone. There are the Apple support forums and of course many unofficial sites on which to seek advice about backing up your iPhone 4 contacts.

To extract data from one of your external drive backups, I guess the first thing is to find it. If you search across the drive by file name (*.pst), then make a copy and place it in a convenient location on your C drive. You then can open it as an additional data file as noted above. Once you’re done with it, you can close it by right-clicking its top level folder in the Navigation pane and choosing Close.

(I realize this is all very abbreviated, but you probably will know most of it as you go.)

Reply | Quote

I tried right clicking the file but it wouldn’t. I am probably looking for the file in the wrong place. In my Documents folder the only .pst file is connected to a Microsoft Works file and is way out of date. I tried to search for anything with a .pst ending but that was all it came up with.
I’m thinking if that’s all I can find on the C drive then that’s probably all that’s on the backup. I did try looking for it, in fact I’ve been on here hours now trying to fix this.
I’m not sure what I did but I did finally find a file attached to my Yahoo account which wasn’t so out of date and somehow, and I really don’t know what I did to find it but I found by altering the default on the “File, Data File Management” to a different choice I managed to get into Outlook.
Now on the left side of my Outlook mail page, at the top I have 3 items in a “Favorites folder”, none of which will open and below that in the “Mail” folder with All Mail Items I have two lists which include the inbox, deleted, junk e-mail etc. I don’t quite know how I ended up with this but at least the mail is coming to one of them and I do have some contacts in it.
What a nightmare, it has caused so much work and I don’t even know what caused it in the first place. I didn’t seem to do anything differently.

I really appreciate all the help I’ve received, I’m sure it was trying to figure out some of the “repairs” that led me to this point. Thankyou so much

Shirley

Reply | Quote

The original file was located where your first post stated: c:UsersShirleyAppDataLocalMicrosoftOutlookOutlook.pst.

You can try and open this file, by doing what jscher2000 recommended, but it’s most likely it won’t open until it is repaired. The only way to repair it would be to try one of the repair tools on the page I posted earlier.

I don’t know anything about the iPhone either, but usually phones have ways to sync with Outlook. Does the iPhone have a way to do that? If it does, you could recover your contacts, at least.

Reply | Quote

I still run Windows XP, so I don’t know whether your search works the same way in Windows 7 or Vista. Do you have the option to search for Hidden Files and Folders? If so, make sure to turn that on when searching your C drive and backup for *.pst files.

Reply | Quote

I still run Windows XP, so I don’t know whether your search works the same way in Windows 7 or Vista. Do you have the option to search for Hidden Files and Folders? If so, make sure to turn that on when searching your C drive and backup for *.pst files.

Search in Vista & Win7 should adhere to the view settings in Windows Explorer.

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote

Thankyou all so much for your help. Somehow I have managed to get into Outlook again and I have imported my contacts from Yahoo, then I manually updated them. At the moment, with the exception of losing all my e-mails I am up and running again.

Thanks again, I couldn’t have done it without your help.

A very merry Christmas to each of you.

Shirley

Reply | Quote

Thankyou all so much for your help. Somehow I have managed to get into Outlook again and I have imported my contacts from Yahoo, then I manually updated them. At the moment, with the exception of losing all my e-mails I am up and running again.

If you can restore your PST file from your backup you can at least import all the email you had at the time of the backup. Restore the PST file to a different location than your current PST file. Then use “Open an Outlook data file” in Outlook. Once the file is open you can drag email from the backup file to your current file. How to access “open an Outlook data file” varies slightly depending on your version of Outlook.

Joe

--Joe

Reply | Quote

Glad you got your email back.

Merry Christmas

Reply | Quote