I've seen this problem posted, and have tried the solutions that were suggested, but haven't been successful at fixing the problem. I have a laptop running XP and Outlook 2000. I exported the pst file from Outlook 2000 and then imported it back to make sure that it works (it did). I then copied it onto a CD (copied both the recently exported pst file, backup.pst, and the original outlook.pst file). Afterwards, I reformatted my laptop, installed Office 2003, and then tried to import the pst file, and it complains that the files are not pst files (both the backup.pst and Outlook.pst file). I've copied the file onto my local hard drive, cleared the read only flag, even tried to set the archive attribute, tried scanpst.exe (also complained that it isn't a pst file) everything, and nothing seems to work. I've also tried to import it into Outlook 2000 on a different computer, same problem. Has anyone found a solution to this problem? Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Don't import the pst file. If you already ran Outlook, you've created a new pst file. Delete that file. Copy your old pst file into another folder on the drive. Preferably another partition. Then, open Outlook. You will then get an error saying the pst file couldn't be found. At that point, browse to the old file in the new location, and voila. All mail, contacts, etc. will be there. Very simple, actually.

I tried that and it still didn't work. I think I know what's happening although I don't know why. I opened the pst file with a hex editor and it looks like the whole file is just filled with 0x00, even though it's 1MB large. I'm not sure how that happened since I imported the file before I copied it to the CD. I also had other files on the CD and they are fine.

So, you copied the pst file to the local drive and removed the read-only attribute?

I don't see the requirement to delete any .pst involved in this situation. When you open Outlook just click on File/Open/Personal Folders File (.pst) and when prompted just browse to where your suspect .pst file is located on your hdd. I've opened .pst files directly from a CD to. The key as mentioned before is to take of the "read only" attribute that is put on by default when those file types are burned. Where's the any key?

Hi, just catching this now. Having the same problem, but am unable to take off the "read only" attribute. It won't let me. Any clues? I have uninstalled and reinstalled Outlook about 3 or 4x and it is not creating a new .pst file. But I'd rather use my old one (on CD from 2 days ago) instead. Thanks!