are my contacts gone?

[malefactor]

I was having trouble making outlook work. It just suddenly would not start up. All the typical advice, and a lot of nontypical advice, failed. Reinstalls failed. So, I have to move on and I proceed to sync up with a separate machine.. a laptop.

There are already 2 profiles that the phone is synced with, so it tells me I have to delete one. I delete both. They're just profiles, after all, and they don't actually work any more.

Now, all my contacts are gone. I've got a really bad feeling that I just told my phone to delete all my contacts.

I'm a programmer. If that's indeed what just happened, this is such astoundingly bad design that I'm pretty much ready to write off windows mobile as "crap"--especially given the fact that I did all this BECAUSE outlook randomly decided to stop working (the famous crash upon startup).

Is there anything, no matter how technical, I can do to get these contacts back?

[malefactor]

I just looked at pim.vol in the phone root, and found some of the information in my contacts list, so it implies to me that it should still be there / recoverable. How can I make the phone / outlook / activesync sort this mess out?

[tomX2]

hello i'm afaid i'm not much help. but i think i lost all my contacts as well! very very bad. i upgraded to outlook 2003. i deleted my sync settings and created a new relationship. i ran activesync. outlook/activesync deleated all my contacts!! i wanted my contacts to populate outlook...

i'm sick,
tom

[zabardast_1]

I just looked at pim.vol in the phone root, and found some of the information in my contacts list, so it implies to me that it should still be there / recoverable. How can I make the phone / outlook / activesync sort this mess out?
Reinstall the PIMbackup in your phone and restore the Pim.vol or transfer the pim.vol to a miniSD card and get a card reader and backup to your PC.hope it'll do the trick.Secondly,it's been reported that the outlook 2007 is having sync problems with contacts on wm6,install outlook 2003 and check if it works out.
Good luck :)

[malefactor]

I'm able to restore the prior pim.vol, finally. But all the contacts are still gone. The microsoft user groups (and microsoft employees that post in there) are quite silent about this - I even tried posting there.

Meanwhile, I have tried every version of outlook I can find. Nothing will actually run on my machine. It's only when you experience something like this that you figure out just how amazingly bad Microsoftware is; I spent about 2 hours trying to make Outlook work, doing everything from erasing all profiles and contacts, re-implanting / re-registering DLLs, to invoking it in every kind of safe mode.. complete uninstall + reinstall..

No dice. Outlook crashes upon startup without a single word as to why. I EVEN TRIED debugging it with visual studio. I'm not a wintel programmer, but it looks to me like the software branched to a nonexistent address (opcodes were garbage).

It is pathetic that Outlook can crash for 50 different reasons with the same failure characteristics, and it holds the user in contempt.

I won't use software like that if I can avoid it. I hope the googlephone buries windows mobile.