Copy from HDD to SSD breaks Outlook

[Haole Boy]

Installed an SSD in a client's machine yesterday. Samsung SSD, so I used the Samsung data copy program to copy from the 1TB HDD to the 500GB SSD. System boots, everything seems OK, give machine back to client. He calls a little while later saying his address book isn't there. Win 10, Outlook 2016 configured with IMAP. Send and receive are working, but no address book, and no autocomplete when typing in an address.

Has anyone else seen this? I'm somewhat at a loss of how to prevent this from happening as there did not appear to be any errors during the copy. FWIW, all this info is part of the OST file, and it's there on the SSD, so it's not a missing file situation.

I spent a couple of hours futzing around trying to fix this with no success, finally called Lisa at Call That Girl. She was able to assist and everything is now working! Big shout out to her!

Thanx,

Harry Z

 

[Porthos]

finally called Lisa at Call That Girl. She was able to assist and everything is now working! Big shout out to her!

Well, what was the issue and the fix? Don't tease us.

 

[glennd]

I suspect Outlook was broken before the migration. The customer either didn't know or is not going to admit it.

 

[pcpete]

Well, what was the issue and the fix? Don't tease us.

I concur

 

[seashore]

I suspect Outlook was broken before the migration. The customer either didn't know or is not going to admit it.

Yeah, should be easy to verify if the HDD is still available.

 

[Haole Boy]

Well, what was the issue and the fix? Don't tease us.

So, the issue was stated in my original post. (No address book and/or autocomplete - not 100% sure which one the customer was complaining about as I did not ask the right questions). I suspect it was the autocomplete for email addresses. Customer maintains that it was working before the migration, and this is not something I checked before doing the transfer.

As for the "fix". Following Lisa's instructions, I purchased Stellar OST to PST Converter. Made a copy of the OST file from my backup and ran the converter on that to get a PST file. Moved the PST to the customer's machine, and then had Lisa remote in to the customer's machine while I watched. She played with it for a little while and eventually ended up making a separate PST file that just had the Contacts, and connected that to existing Outlook configuration. That got Contacts working

As for the autocomplete, the files used for this did get transferred to the new SSD, but somehow Outlook was not finding them. At this point I'm not sure exactly what she did, but she got it working. Perhaps Lisa @callthatgirl can contribute if she has the time.

After all this, I had about 2.5 hours of non-billable time invested, I was out $80 for the converter software, plus a significant rise in blood pressure. Any future Outlook issues will immediately be referred to Lisa. Not worth the aggravation for me (I only deal with Outlook about twice a year, so spending hours and hours learning it's intricacies is a waste of time for me.)

Yeah, should be easy to verify if the HDD is still available.

The old (failing) HD was returned to the customer. Assuming I still had it, how could this be checked?


So, now that you guys have some additional background, I'd like to return to my original intent of this thread:

1) Any idea how / why this could have happened? I ran both an 'sfc /scannow' and 'chkdsk' after the transfer with no issues.

2) Any suggestions on how to prevent this from happening again? e.g.: should i do a clean boot before running the migration tool?

Mahalo for your assistance

Harry Z

 

[johnrobert]

since you still had old hard drive all you had to do was export them and then import into new system.
This is why I always use Acronis, if you find something that's easy and always works stick with it

 

[Haole Boy]

since you still had old hard drive all you had to do was export them and then import into new system.
This is why I always use Acronis, if you find something that's easy and always works stick with it

I did not have the old hard drive. It was returned to the customer when he picked up his PC. I did have a full disk backup created with Drive Snapshot and I was able to retrieve the OST from that. But, having just the OST file itself was kinda useless without a working install of Outlook to open it with.

I have never had this problem before using the Samsung drive copy utility. Of course, I'm not sure how many of the customers that I've done the SSD upgrade for use Outlook, either.

Harry Z

 

[johnrobert]

Sorry did not read all posts
I did try Samsung drive copy utility once it looked like it was going to take a day or more so switched to Acronis since I was on site

 

[seashore]

The old (failing) HD was returned to the customer. Assuming I still had it, how could this be checked?

Just put it back in the computer in place of the SSD. If a customer told me there was anything different after a clone/image to SSD this is the first thing I'd to do demonstrate in front of them whether the problem was pre-existing.

 

[Porthos]

Just put it back in the computer in place of the SSD. If a customer told me there was anything different after a clone/image to SSD this is the first thing I'd to do demonstrate in front of them whether the problem was pre-existing.

Especially if they were expecting me to fix it for free.

 

[Haole Boy]

Just put it back in the computer in place of the SSD. If a customer told me there was anything different after a clone/image to SSD this is the first thing I'd to do demonstrate in front of them whether the problem was pre-existing.

Well in today's environment, this would entail another interaction with someone outside my household. Trying to keep this to a minimum....

 

[timeshifter]

As you all know some laptops you have to tear the whole damn thing apart to swap drives. Others take about a minute.