Outlook PST is now empty!

I had had some problems closing Outlook down recently, got some error messages saying Windows couldn't close Outlook, had to hit the "end now" box.

While using Outlook and surfing the net, I got the "blue screen of death ". My laptop tried to reboot, but couldn't, not even in safe mode. Overnight the PC was successful in rebooting. (was on the road traveling) Everything was fine except for Outlook could not find my pst file, said it was "not a personal folders file ". I searched for the pst file and for some reason it was empty. The Archive.pst file contained 48 MB of emails and I was able to access the Archive.pst.

Got home yesterday, PC wouldn't start and went into chkdisk mode. It fixed a few errors and then booted okay. However, still can't start Outlook. I tried to run the Inbox Repair tool but it said the file cannot be recovered because it is not large enough to contain any useful data.

Where did my original pst file go? It does not show up on any file search. Can I recover these few years of very, very important emails?

Thank you in advance!

My version is Microsoft 2002 running under XP Professional.