Corrupt Address Book .dat files

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Oh boy! Its crisis time!

Both my address.dat and address.bak files won’t open in my Palm Desktop application. Unfortuantly, my Palm device has been out of order for two months (I’m having lots of fun conversations with Palm support about that one)…anyway… so I can’t HotSync the data back into a blank Palm Desktop.

Has anyone come across a program/app that will extract data from a Palm .dat to CSV, Excel, Access or anything that will allow me to get it back into the Palm Desktop? I’ve had a trail through the usual search engines, but no joy?

TIA,

Ade

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You sound like you might know something about a problem I have.
What if you delibrately delete those .dat files…will that clear that component of Outlook in the Palm, and set up a completely fresh sync from Outlook?

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I accept no responsibility for this, but yes.

If you delete the address.dat file and then open Palm Desktop you will have no address entries. Close Palm Desktop and it will create a new address.dat. Do a HotSync and the addresses in your Palm will be added to that new address.dat

(addendum: if you’re trying to clear out the addresses in your Palm DEVICE, then set your HotSync for “Desktop overwrite” before you do the Hotsync in the description above; otherwise you’ll just be back where you started).

Now, about my problem…

Hope that helps,

Ade (still desperate!)

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Would this help?
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/3216/faq_pg21.htm

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But didn’t the poster say the file wouldn’t open in Palm Desktop?

(P.S., see here to make your links “hot”.)

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Thanks for the pointers guys,

Unfortuantly, I’m not a Perl programmer and have already tried the VB utility at your link John – no joy.
Thanks for your link Bill, but as John mentioned, I can’t open the file in Palm Desktop, so thats a non-starter I’m affraid.

All is not lost however, the excellent chap on the other end of HelpHand kindly responded to a direct email plea for help!

He pointed me at an excellent command line utility called STRINGS (available here), which will read text strings out of dll’s, dats, com, anything really! Redirect the output to a text file and I have a clean file of addresses – I will need to spend a few days (?) formatting into a CSV and I’ve lost my categories, but, hey…I’ve got my address book back in some sort of format!

If anyone has a better solution then post-away, like I said, I’m going to be formatting for a few days!

Thanks for your help,

Ade

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A belated thank you for the pointer to the STRINGS utility! That may recover raw text information from all kinds of corrupted and otherhow hammered files.

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I need help running the STRINGS utility to recover a corrrupted .dat file. Any possibility you could assist after 21 years!?

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Try BinText. (I’ve not used it)
https://packetstormsecurity.com/files/23823/bintext.zip.html

An online extractor.
https://www.boxentriq.com/code-breaking/text-extractor

cheers, Paul

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I can’t help you directly, but have you looked at the file with a hex viewer, and was anything here of any use?

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