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I had to reformat my hard drive this weekend, I thought the other guy backed up my .pst file, he thought I did.... bottom line is neither of us backed it up. I was able to use a recovery software to get it out of the sectors on the drive, but its now in 41 different pieces. I need to know how to get this all into one file so I can run the scanpst.exe on it and reinstall it in the folder. Does anyone know how to put the 41 pieces back together into one file?
How To Relocate a .PST file
When you upgrade software for one of your users, or replace a hard drive on a user's workstation, you first have to back up all necessary data. When you do that, make sure you don't forget the ever-popular .pst file. Some users may create this file to store their personal mail and contact information locally, and they can get very annoyed if this file isn't migrated.
When you back up the data, search for a .pst file on the hard drive, just so you won't forget it. If you find one, examine the date to verify the file's validity. If it looks old and out of date, then just as a precautionary measure copy the file onto some temporary storage in case the user requires it at a later date. Also check for any rules that the user might have enabled. If you don't recreate those rules, you can get into some trouble.
I would suggest that users create .pst files using common folder names ("email" is a good example), so that the folder can be easily identified.
Once you've found a valid .pst file, here's how you can move it.
Outlook 2000
First remove the personal folders option:
- In Outlook click on tools then services
- Highlight personal folders and select remove
- Exit from outlook
- Create a folder called email. Move the pst file from its current location to the email folder.
- Open Outlook. Go to tools then services and add a personal folder pointing the location to the newly created folder.
Outlook 2002
- Locate the existing .pst file.
- Rename this file.
- Copy the renamed file to a new folder called "email" on the hard drive.
- Rename the file copied to the email folder to the original name.
- When you start Outlook you will be informed that Outlook couldn't locate the existing .pst file.
- When Outlook prompts for the missing .pst file, point to the file copied to the "email" folder by selecting File > Open > Outlook Data File.
How to combine PST files
Creating the second PST file
Because I didn't want to screw with my own working email environment, I created a simple PST file demo on our test machine in the OutlookPower lab. To do this, I simply set up a fresh install of Outlook and dropped in a few folders in the default PST file. That's our starting point. You can see our folder structure in Figure A.
The first thing you'll need to do is create a second PST file. You can do this by hitting the Data File Management link on the screen, or by selecting Data File Management from the Outlook 2003 File menu. In any case, you'll see the dialog box shown in Figure B
See this link for more help