Lost addresses - file not corrupted

All the addresses in my Personal Address Book suddenly disappeared. This happened once before, and I was able to fix it with the "corrupted abook.mab" fix. However, this time that fix doesn't work, and neither does the other one suggested at http://home.att.net/~cherokee67.

I don't know what happened to cause this, but I have just switched to sbcglobal DSL.

Any suggestions? Thanks! Robin

 

Welcome to the Forum, RasRobin!

Hi RasRobin,

Did Netscape crash, or did you reinstall Netscape? Netscape and SBCGlobal have had some compatibility issues in Mail & Newsgroups.

When you view the Address Book, what is listed in the left Pane? I assume there is nothing in the right pane, correct? Have you scrolled all the way to the bottom of the right pane, to ensure that you are not just viewing blank lines?

In Windows Explorer, navigate to your *.slt (salted) folder. What size is the abook.mab file? Does it register 0 KB? If the Address Book isn't 0 KB, then open the abook.mab file in Notepad. Look for any binary garbage at the end of the file, similar to this:
õ0OZ¬¬ÃŠÃ¡®ÃŽÅ½ÃPsTG¼{êAð†`÷oOáÑZHoqâmâ€Ã¦â„¢¿

You've already done everything suggested here:
Corrupt or Disappearing Address Book?

Let us know,

Ramona

 

Ramona -

Thank you so much for responding.

Netscape didn't crash, nor did I recently reinstall it. My computer has frozen a few times (which is not unusual, even before the switch to SBC) and I have had to turn it off at the button (resulting in the "running tests" start when I turned it on again.)

The left pane in my address book has listed: Personal Address Book, Collected Addresses and pab. (The pab file is old, from trying to fix the last time my address book came up empty. At least I do have some email addresses because of this file, but they are all a year or so old!)

My abook.mab file isn't completely empty, since it was set to collect addresses (I have since turned it off so it isn't collecting any more at this point.) It doesn't have any binary garbage (that was the problem last time.) I did try both of the fixes listed on the web page you referred me to (the Netscape Solutions page.)

I have tried to find an Address Book backup file (i.e. abook.bak?) but I don't know if there is one or what its name or location would be.

At this point I suspect that I'm just going to have to build my address book from scratch, and make sure that I create my own back up file now and then! If you have any other suggestions, let me know.

Thanks again, Robin