XP & Outlook Express, where has my Inbox Gone?

[SunnyD]

Okay, this is happening to me more and more often now. I've recently migrated up to Windows XP and have been chugging along relatively happily for a few months now.

But things are getting iffy now. Occasionally currupt drives (harddrives that is), little glitches here and there, etc. All this stuff is fixable, but it's happening more and more often lately.

The newest problem, my Inbox in Outlook Express disappears. Yes, it disappeard, sortof. Outlook Express constructs a brand new one with that stupid "Welcome to Outlook Express" message. All of my old messages are g-o-n-e. So to speak.

I can recover the old messages be deleting the Folders.dbx store file and letting outlook make a new one of those. It then reads the old Inbox.dbx file which is still there, along with all of my old messages.

But why am I getting wonderfully corrupt files so often these days? Hmm...

SunnyD

 

[corkyg]

IF your are running McAfee Viruscan 6.0, then that is the problem. I had it and did three reinstalls of XP Pro before I figured it out.

If that is the case, it is a known bug, and there is a patch to fix it bringing VScan to 6.02. After putting that in I got back my mail files in OE6.

 

[HdwGuy]

It also could be a hard drive about to go belly up on you. Are your drives logical or phyiscal? In other words do you have two seperate hard drives or are the drives a logical partition on one hard drive? If it is logical I would suggest that you run a surface scan with scandisk.

 

[SunnyD]

Heh. Nope, no virus scanners here. I don't believe in them.

As far as the harddrives go, I am certain there's no problems with them. I've been having erratic harddrive problems ONLY ever since I've installed WinXP. On top of that, I've run manufacturer diagnostics on both drives, and they have a clean bill of health. I am 100% certain this is a Windows XP thing. I just can't figure out what.

SunnyD

 

[barryng]

I posted an article in this forum last night about XP's ability to corrupt harddrives. In my case, I was inadvertently using a SCSI card (for a scanner and zip drive) that is not XP compatible. The result, after four weeks of trouble free ops, was the sudden occurence of so many crosslinked files and/or registry damage that it became necessary to reformat and start from scratch. After replacing the card with one that Microsoft says is compatible, the problem went away.

This is really a major concern. With all previous operating systems incompatible whatever simply meant lock ups and reboots. Now data gets corrupted.

 

[Asghar]

Just to add that yesterday after starting Outlook Express, my Inbox was empty apart the default Microsoft Welcome Mail. Outlook had created a new Inbox (1).dbx to use, the original Inbox.dbx was still there but Outlook refused to use it, even after deleting Inbox (1).dbx Outlook just created a new one instead of reverting back to Inbox.dbx.

So far, after deleting Inbox (1).dbx AND Folders.dbx everything seems back to normal, fingers crossed.

I am running Windows 2000 and Outlook Express shutdown without problems as normal before the problem occured. Hope the above makes sense.