Corrupted Outlook Express (.dbx) files

Moriarty · 22-05-2005 3:42pm #1

Bleurgh, just the thing I need right now

Woke up today, flicked on the pc, opened OE 6.. and most of my folders were missing. 'Uhoh'. There's three folders that are fine as far as I can see, out of about 12 seperate ones. I've lost tens of thousands of emails going back years, some of which are important. My last backup was from november

.

Now, I think I've found out what broke everything. This says that mcafee virusscan has a nice little habbit of corrupting the .dbx files when it feels like it. I'm running mcafee virusscan enterprise 8.0.0. I followed the links to the mcafee site, and got the recovery tool they pointed to (dbxtract), but it isn't really working. I'm loathe to pay a further $25 for the 'upgraded' version when the basic one is so crap.

So, what I'm looking for is something that can repair these .dbx files for Outlook Express 6, so that I can get all my emails back, and then start using thunderbird and making weekly backups so this shít doesn't happen again.

Pints or other suitable payment for anyone that finds something that'll do the job

newgrange · 22-05-2005 3:49pm

DBXtract
PM me

Moriarty · 22-05-2005 3:52pm

I've tried DBXtract already. It didn't appear to work, as it couldn't recover anything from most folders and only grabbed a couple of hundred from the largest one which contained thousands.

Capt'n Midnight · 22-05-2005 4:00pm

newgrange wrote:

DBXtract
PM me

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_description/0,fid,23383,00.asp

pcwares · 22-05-2005 4:03pm

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;233264
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/community/columns/filecorruption.mspx
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;283205

what os are u on and how patched are u? Are you on a network/stand alone/do you use peer to peer sharing/steam off Kazaa and the sorts etc..there is a particular set of bogies on that site...

i going to do some testing on this fix first. Unless you know why it would not work.

pcwares

Moriarty · 22-05-2005 5:40pm

XP SP2, fully up to date patch wise. I'm on a network, but there's no drive shares/active directorys/anything like that. The only p2p I use is bittorrent - and even that rarely.

I've just finished a full scandisk with no reported errors, so I'll give dbxtract another bash now.

Moriarty · 22-05-2005 5:56pm

Right, I've run DBXtract again. Same thing is happening. I select a .dbx to extract, point it to a folder that exists, click extract. It runs for about a second, then a popup appears saying 'Extraction Complete'. I go to the folder I pointed it to and theres a folder there for the .dbx I was trying to extract, but the folder is empty.

If I run it on .dbx's that OE is opening fine on it's own, it does extract all the emails in the .dbx. Does this mean what I suspect it means - the other .dbxs are corrupted beyond repair?

Corrupted Outlook Express (.dbx) files

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