I went through all of the posts pertaining to "unreadable .pst files" and
didn't see this situation. I was wondering if perhaps someone could shed some
light on this or make a suggestion.

I was running Outlook 2003 on a Win2K PC when the dreaded hard drive crash
occurred. Luckily for me (or so I thought) i had my trusty nightly Robocopy
backup to  fall back on. I moved the 400+ Mb mail file to another PC running
Office 2003 under WinXP and was told that the file was not a personal folders
file. DRATS!

I tried Scanpst - and that didn't work - same message. I tried downloading
numerous "repair" programs and none of those worked (even the $249 one!). I
used a Hex editor to view the file because one of the sites I found suggested
altering bytes 7 - 13 to maybe "trick" Scnapst to work, but the file was full
of Hex 00 (is that null?).  Now you might say that, perhaps, the last backup
that was made picked up some bad data right before the drive went south, but
there's more to the story.

After fooling around with this for a good while, I came upon a copy of my
mail file from July of last year that I had put on a CD. So I didn't lose
EVERYTHING after all, just about 8 months worth of e-mails. Well, I copied
the file to my hard drive, made sure the READ ONLY attribute was not set, and
tried to open the file: same message! "not a personal folder file". Scanpst
was no help, as was the same for all of the "pay-to-play" packages.

Now, I can see one file not being good, but two? Is it possible that Outlook
runs differently under Win2K than WinXP as far as service packs, etc.? Am I
doing something wrong when either backing up the file or restoring it?

Thanks for your help!