Hello,

After having spent 5 hours continously on trying to find a solution, I am
submitting my problem over here hoping to get some help.

OS: Vista Home Edition
Outlook: 2007 version

My .pst file is stored on a Maxtor detachable drive and Outlook opens it
from there. I have been doing this for a year now. Today when Outlook opened
this .pst file, it showed all the emails (and folder structure) correctly
"for a few seconds" only. But right after that, it started showing the above
error message when clicking on any folder or individual email. Its
nightmarish for me since all my very very important emails are in there
without any recent backup.

When I try to copy this file in Windows Explorer (with Outlook being
closed), I get the following error: "Cannot read from source file or disk."

After having read on some forums, I got the impression that this .pst file
is (or getting) locked by some other process. In other words, this problem
could have something to do with lock on the .pst file. So I tried all listed
solutions but without any success. There was a suggestion to use "Unlocker"
for seeing if some other process might have locked it. I tried Unlocker but
it says this file is not locked by any process.

I do not want to use scanpst tool since it throws away (based on my previous
experience) a lot of emails from the .pst file. Plus my .pst does not seem to
be corrupt at all since it is showing all the emails for the first few
seconds and then starts displaying the above error message.

There was also a suggestion to copy this file in safe mode, get rid of the
current version and start with the copied version. But that also is not
possible since in Safe Mode the notebook is not recognizing the maxtor
detachable drive and as explained above, I am not able to copy this file to
local hard disk.

Can someone please help me?

Thanks a ton in advance. Hope to solve this without loosing any emails.