How to salvage address book?

V S Rawat

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Mar 18, 2006, 10:17:19 AM3/18/06

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Today, there was a power failure, coupled with ups failure, causing my
pc to reboot.

On restarting, xp did chkdsk.

When I started TB, and tried to compose a mail, TB said "your address
book is damaged. renaming it to "abook.mab-1.bak" and creating new
address book. It did so and mail went ok. however, there were no
addresses in the new address book.

I explored my profile and found
abook.mab
abook.mab-1.bak 296 KB 3/18
abook.mab.bak 552 KB 2/15

yeah. A month ago, my previous address book has also disappeared but I
have not got any alert, nor noticed it much. I then had started creating
new address book, which is also gone today.

Anyway.

I opened the bak files and they opened quite ok in metapad. They do have
entire information intact in ascii, however, there is some junk attached
at the end of them. One of them even has entire mails with attachment in it.

Is there any method that I can pick the valid addresses from those two
bak address books, and patch in my current address book?

btw, if I trim my old addressbook bak file to the point where
indicipherable junk begins, will it work?

thanks.
--
Rawat

John Doue

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Mar 18, 2006, 11:45:23 AM3/18/06

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Nothing to lose if you try, just save the original before experimenting.

--
John Doue

V S Rawat

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Mar 18, 2006, 2:36:15 PM3/18/06

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Original (current one) is empty, so nothing to loose if it also get
corrupted.

Shall try tomorrow and write back.

--
Rawat

Irwin Greenwald

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Mar 18, 2006, 5:30:52 PM3/18/06

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With TB closed, I would try:
rename abook.mab
create new empty file abook.mab
copy *contents of* abook.mab.bak into abook.mab
edit the junk out of abook.mab

Start TB and see if your address book is readable. If so, backup your
profile!

Irwin

--
Irwin Greenwald - Mozilla Champion
*Technical messages sent to my email address will be ignored*

Etiquette - http://www.mozilla.org/community/etiquette.html
About Profiles -
http://users.adelphia.net/~irwingreenwald/About%20Profiles.html
OE Quotefix - http://home.in.tum.de/~jain/software/oe-quotefix/

V S Rawat

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Mar 19, 2006, 2:12:05 PM3/19/06

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Thanks M/s Doue and Greenwald,

It worked. I deleted the indecipherable part from both my previous
abook.mab.bak, then renamed them to abook.mab and started TB.

It opened perfectly well, with all my contacts intact. I exported them
to a csv file, each.

And then I created a new address book and got both of those lists
imported. Now, I have got back all my addresses. Though, I had to delete
duplicates that I had recreated in second address book.

Thanks again.
--
Rawat

Standard8

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Mar 19, 2006, 4:49:05 PM3/19/06

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> It worked. I deleted the indecipherable part from both my previous
> abook.mab.bak, then renamed them to abook.mab and started TB.
>
> It opened perfectly well, with all my contacts intact. I exported them
> to a csv file, each.
>
> And then I created a new address book and got both of those lists
> imported. Now, I have got back all my addresses. Though, I had to delete
> duplicates that I had recreated in second address book.

Hi,

Can you just let us know which OS you are using? I have seen a similar
problem and like to find out if it is just on Linux or not.

Thanks
Standard8

V S Rawat

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Mar 20, 2006, 3:33:18 AM3/20/06

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xpsp2.

--
Rawat