A
AXE
Take a deep breath as this will be long winded...
Thanks in advance to those who will take the time to read this.
Back Story:
I have inherited the administrative duties at a site with one Windows
2003 SBS (r2?) box and about ten workstations. There were at least 2
former admins, neither of which left me much in the way of documentation.
After two days of applying the 168 odd windows XP/Office
XP/Adobe/Java/etc. etc. I "fixed" the 2003 SBS client software updater
while trying to fix a problem it was causing by destroying all of the
local printer mappings.
The SBS promptly attempted to install Outlook 2003 to one of the
workstations when the user logged in. I disabled the automatic updater,
and checked the users outlook out to see what kind of damage was done. I
gave a sigh of <premature> relief when I saw that the office XP version
of outlook was still loading and the users mail was there and functioning
normally. Since I had only been tasked with creating a new user profile
and fixing the printing problems that day. The user still had an
unrelated printer issue when I went home, but his outlook was fine.
I came in to work Monday to the _unhappy_ news that the users outlook
couldn't find their .PST file at startup. This is where things get
interesting.
Logged in as a local administrator, with show all hidden/system
folders/files/file extensions/and other files which should never be
hidden from someone with admin access turned on... I see nothing in the
path the users .pst file should be in. Searching the HDD yields similar
results.
To make things ++Fun the users profile is acting goofy. The users profile
showed up under "C:\Documents and Settings\Manager" originally, now it is
showing up as "Manager.DOMAINNAME" and all of the application paths are
now broken. This folder only exists when the user Manager is logged in.
It appears to be created on the fly at login as part of a roaming
profile. The old managers folder now only contains a few .tmp files.
The trouble is that the PST that should be at:
"C:\Documents and Settings\Manager\Local Settings\Application Data
\Microsoft\Outlook"
It isn't there and the Outlook folder doesn't even exist in the
Manager.DOMAINNAME path.
"C:\Documents and Settings\Manager.DOMAINNAME\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft" has a few other folders but now outlook data.
I searched the SBS server, and found nothing that matched the users PST
on any of the servers drives.
MS doesn't support syncing PST files for roaming profiles or accessing
them via SMB shares, but I think that one of the previous Admins MIGHT
have enabled folder/file redirection for the outlook data files.
Other things to dash the hopes of those suggesting easy fixes.
1 I looked for archive.pst as well as outlook.pst and anything else .pst
on all drives of the server and the workstation. The only thing I found
was a manual backup the user made in 2005.
2 AutoArchive appeared to be disabled, but was pointing to:
"C:\Documents and Settings\Manager\Local Settings\Application Data
\Microsoft\Outlook\Archive.pst"
-Axe
Thanks in advance to those who will take the time to read this.
Back Story:
I have inherited the administrative duties at a site with one Windows
2003 SBS (r2?) box and about ten workstations. There were at least 2
former admins, neither of which left me much in the way of documentation.
After two days of applying the 168 odd windows XP/Office
XP/Adobe/Java/etc. etc. I "fixed" the 2003 SBS client software updater
while trying to fix a problem it was causing by destroying all of the
local printer mappings.
The SBS promptly attempted to install Outlook 2003 to one of the
workstations when the user logged in. I disabled the automatic updater,
and checked the users outlook out to see what kind of damage was done. I
gave a sigh of <premature> relief when I saw that the office XP version
of outlook was still loading and the users mail was there and functioning
normally. Since I had only been tasked with creating a new user profile
and fixing the printing problems that day. The user still had an
unrelated printer issue when I went home, but his outlook was fine.
I came in to work Monday to the _unhappy_ news that the users outlook
couldn't find their .PST file at startup. This is where things get
interesting.
Logged in as a local administrator, with show all hidden/system
folders/files/file extensions/and other files which should never be
hidden from someone with admin access turned on... I see nothing in the
path the users .pst file should be in. Searching the HDD yields similar
results.
To make things ++Fun the users profile is acting goofy. The users profile
showed up under "C:\Documents and Settings\Manager" originally, now it is
showing up as "Manager.DOMAINNAME" and all of the application paths are
now broken. This folder only exists when the user Manager is logged in.
It appears to be created on the fly at login as part of a roaming
profile. The old managers folder now only contains a few .tmp files.
The trouble is that the PST that should be at:
"C:\Documents and Settings\Manager\Local Settings\Application Data
\Microsoft\Outlook"
It isn't there and the Outlook folder doesn't even exist in the
Manager.DOMAINNAME path.
"C:\Documents and Settings\Manager.DOMAINNAME\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft" has a few other folders but now outlook data.
I searched the SBS server, and found nothing that matched the users PST
on any of the servers drives.
MS doesn't support syncing PST files for roaming profiles or accessing
them via SMB shares, but I think that one of the previous Admins MIGHT
have enabled folder/file redirection for the outlook data files.
Other things to dash the hopes of those suggesting easy fixes.
1 I looked for archive.pst as well as outlook.pst and anything else .pst
on all drives of the server and the workstation. The only thing I found
was a manual backup the user made in 2005.
2 AutoArchive appeared to be disabled, but was pointing to:
"C:\Documents and Settings\Manager\Local Settings\Application Data
\Microsoft\Outlook\Archive.pst"
-Axe