Hi everyone,
I'm kind of manipulating the pim.vol file, and when I copy one over the original, and the try to modifie it (using the any api), I can see that the file used by pocket outlook is not the one I just copied.
One easy solution is to soft reset the pocket pc, and then pocket outlook read the new pim.vol, but this is kind of boring.
So my question is : does any one know how to tell to pocket outlook to reload its pim.vol file with having to soft-reset.
P.S : I've already tried to kill the poutlook process, but then everything is going so unstable that I don't think this is the way.
Thanks for your help guys.
Ed
You say you're "kind of manipulating the pim.vol file".
Does that mean you have a description of the file format at hand ?
I'm looking for it.
regards,
inetd.
I have the backup of PIM.VOL from AKU2.x and AKU3.x of my contacts before upgrade but Aku2.x PIM.VOL files are totally useless in Aku3.x. So better use outlook to backup, that is the safest.
They are of very different if you view the files in hex mode.
Those from AKU2.x seems to place the phone number before name and AKU3.x seems to place the name before the phone number.
hi people,
is there a way to save the contacts onto a sd card?
Tell us why you want to do that, probably we can get you a definate answer.
You can save contacts by means of backing up your phone, whch can be done with various software which can make an exe into your SD card. This exe can then be used to restore your phone (and contact)
Try Spb Backup, Sprite Backup
If you are trying to... ok, just tell us why you want to do that. I can go on and on and one.
In general, you can't store your contacts on your SD just like that.
at now my computer doesn't work and i am sitting in a internet cafe, so i can't sync my contacts with my PC. The other problem is, that i will send my prophet in the next days to repair the speaker in it.
have you got an idea how to seve the contacts??
Get Activesync and download SPB Backup and install on this internet cafe. Use SPB Backup to backup your stuff into your SD card, it ought to backup your contacts as well. Keep the SD card. Once you got your phone back, just execute the EXE file by SPB Backup, it will restore everything of your phone including theme, programs, settings, contacts, calendars.. etc.
You can also use the tool I'm gonna post below
It saves all your contacts to one file on your SD-Card.
Havn't tried to restore a backup file though..
BTW The file came from some PDAmobiz package.
hanmin the owner of the internetcafe doesnt allow me to install activesync or anything else.
mccune thank you very much. i'll give a try. thx again.
Don't bother with all that, I had the same problem in that I had to return my phone.
levenum, offered me the solution
"As for backing up contacts, there is a simple and painless way that doesn't require any installation.
In the built in file explorer select "show all files" option. Then in the root of the device you will see a file named 'pim.vol'. Just copy that to your SD."
If the phone says it can not copy as part of the file is locked, rename it first and then copy it, I don't why you can rename but not copy if it is locked, but it works.
When you transfer it back onto the phone it might not let you overwrite the original saying it is locked again. Just rename and then copy your file to the phone, you will need to soft reboot for the contacts to show.
serhataga said:
hanmin the owner of the internetcafe doesnt allow me to install activesync or anything else.
mccune thank you very much. i'll give a try. thx again.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
HAve you got a pendrive with BT? put it on the internet cafe and try to do everything with BT. Not! find a friend with Internet and download Jeyo Mobile, you can make with this tool a backup of your contacts to your sim or from your sim to your device.
the software that mccune has posted works fine. also the hint of NewSPV is great. ofcourse you can save your contacts to SIM but than you have by one contact if it has more than one number or adress more entries on the SIM of that person instead of one outlook contact.
thank you all for your replies.
problem's solved now
I must apologise, I thought that the software from mccune was the terrible one I had that demanded net framework 2.
I have just tried it and it is great. I have had a problem from day one with Outlook and Activesync, in that they would not sync and I kept getting 'Synchronzation Error'.
I just ran this bit of software, and it somehow just fixed my 'Synchronzation Error', all contacts loaded to Outlook.
Thanks
Since the file - pim.vol stores the Contacts database which is located at the Root Directory.. Copy it and Save it on your Storage Card using the BUILT IN FILE EXPLORER ( won't work on third party File Explorers like Resco and Total Commander etc.. )
Now you got a backup of your Contacts on your Storage Card, or for security purposes, you may copy them and save it on your PC..
To restore..
Just rename the current pim.vol on the device to any file name ( ex. pim.vol1 or pim.volx ) then copy the pim.vol you have just save to your Storage Card using again the BUILT IN FILE EXPLORER
Reboot device and it is restored. See no ActiveSync involved? :lol:
Goodluck.. and just to make sure, try this before sending your Prophet for repair but i am pretty sure it would work.
Pim
Since the file - pim.vol stores the Contacts database which is located at the Root Directory.. Copy it and Save it on your Storage Card using the BUILT IN FILE EXPLORER ( won't work on third party File Explorers like Resco and Total Commander etc.. )
Now you got a backup of your Contacts on your Storage Card, or for security purposes, you may copy them and save it on your PC..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I was wondering if anyone was going to mention that. I do this every so often with my Wizard, works great no extra software needed.
NewSPV said:
In the built in file explorer select "show all files" option. Then in the root of the device you will see a file named 'pim.vol'. Just copy that to your SD."
If the phone says it can not copy as part of the file is locked, rename it first and then copy it, I don't why you can rename but not copy if it is locked, but it works.
When you transfer it back onto the phone it might not let you overwrite the original saying it is locked again. Just rename and then copy your file to the phone, you will need to soft reboot for the contacts to show.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This worked for me, but I have heard that it is not a reliable way to backup if you are going to reflash the device in between backing up and restoring. Can anyone confirm this? I hard reset to get back a blank phone, and then restored this file, and it worked, but I think I need to use a real backup method before reflashing the phone with a newer WM, since pim.vol might be an unrecognized format to the new WM.
I managed to backup the pim file then put it back into another device got the contacts on it cool. I renamed the original to pin but cannot delete it how can I delete it.
I'm sorry but the software that mccune posted doesn't run the setup on my windows! Can anyone help here!
the file works on windows mobile platform. it is not meant for windows.
I think I have a corrupt pim.vol file. Is there a way to read this file or import it into Outlook?
I performed a rom upgrade (3.5) and my ppc does not open contacts or calendar. I tried to restore the file on an emulator but it too acts the same way. I would really like to read this file and import it to Outook since the info is 1Month older.
Any advise would be greatly appreciated.
What you will need to do is to downgrade back to the AKU level that you were at when you saved the pim.vol. Then copy the pim.vol back to your phone and sync with Activesync so that everything is updated. Then do the upgrade again and sync with Activesync.
From what we have found, pim.vol files cannot be used from other AKU roms. So, a pim.vol form 2.0 will not work with 3.3.
Hi all,
I need to replace the pim.vol file on my Blackstone with an older copy. I tried a simple copy and rename procedure, but after rebooting my device, cprog.exe crashes and the device remains frozen until I change back to the original pim.vol ( via PC using Activesync).
Any ideas how I can replace my pim.vol without my phone freaking out?
Thanks in advance...
Bumping for the first and last time only... anyone?
danrop said:
Hi all,
I need to replace the pim.vol file on my Blackstone with an older copy. I tried a simple copy and rename procedure, but after rebooting my device, cprog.exe crashes and the device remains frozen until I change back to the original pim.vol ( via PC using Activesync).
Any ideas how I can replace my pim.vol without my phone freaking out?
Thanks in advance...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Just simply replacing a file may not work due to which rom it came from. The replace new files with an older version may not be compatible and may also affect registry enties. Always better to use 3rd party apps for backup.
How did you originally backup your PIM data. Did you just copy a file over or did you use 3rd party apps like SPB Backup, Sprite etc?
Thanks for the reply, Fallen... the PIM file is from the same ROM as the one I'm trying to replace for (1.19 that ships with handsets with Orange UK).
I understand what you're saying about using back up software; in fact I had used PIMbackup, but I had stored the backup file generated by this program on the SD card on my phone only, and unfortunately my phone got lost/stolen - a possibility I hadn't taken into account. I've got a replacement handset now.
The pim.vol file I'm trying to replace with was simply copied from my phone's main folder to my PC a long time ago. Although I can view the pim.vol file as a text file and extract contact names and phone numbers amidst the rest of the ASCII junk in there, I was hoping there might be a way to replace it.
Could I get access to the phone internal storage memory without booting up the phone into Windows somehow and then replace the pim.vol file?
Rename the \pim.vol file, to something like pim2.vol, then copy your old replacement into the root of the device.
l3v5y said:
Rename the \pim.vol file, to something like pim2.vol, then copy your old replacement into the root of the device.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Don't mean to be rude, but if you read my original post, you'll know that I've tried that and it didn't work for me, hence this post.
Just recently my device decided to fail and only a hard reset could get it back to life again. No problem I thought - weekly automated backups with Sprite Backup - will be back in a few minutes, just loosing a few days of activity.
Sadly the restore of my most recent backup failed as one of the registry hives seems corrupt and nothing is restored, except the files :-(. So I had to find my latest working backup (which I all keep) which is about 4 months old and restored the device to that state. A start at least...
Now how to get my text messages back from the latest backup? None of the options I found (renaming the original, messing with registry settings of HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Mapi, Mortscript in Startup folder) have worked for me - the original seems to stay no matter what I did.
So I decided to more closely observe how Sprite Backup does the trick and I found a time-window to exploit for my purposes - here is how:
- unpack the latest cemail.vol from the backupfile via Sprite Explorer
- wonder about its size (and cryptic content) -> packed?
- try out usual packers, starting with tar -> rename to cemail.vol.tar -> success (!)
- get cemail.vol in original form
- copy to root folder of device with name cemail.volx
- restore device with a failing backup file (select to restore only cemail.vol) and leave it connected to PC
- observe (via remote connected PC) that reboot after initial settings (so in the actual restore phase) has no cemail.vol in the root folder
- rename the previously copied cemail.volx to cemail.vol
- restore fails (leaving the cemail.volc - tar compressed cemail.vol behind) but cemail.vol is now the one I want
- reboot
- report that Restore failed
- but have cemail.vol that I wanted
- external Backup of SMS
- restore external backup to original folder
- done
To continue where I left off - so what if you need some settings that are inside the corrupted registry hive? I spent hours of searching and trying to dump the corrupt hive to something readable and finally found one tool that works reasonably well. You find it at MSDN here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ce_base/arc...registry-hives-and-cedb-database-volumes.aspx
While rgucomp.exe simply hogs the CPU forever and produces no output, above tool at least delivers some output you can re-use. For my hive it seems to come to a loop-like situation as well (you need to Ctrl-C to end it) but the output until ending with "Finished registry walk" is delivering all you may need. It looks like:
Code:
hKey=0x00000EA9 hNext=0x00000E5F [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\QuickApp] hSubKey=0x00000000 hVal=0x00000EC3
hVal=0x00000EC3 hNext=0x00000EC2 "1"="{6D48AB52-635C-4c6a-8508-9D32A0F07863}"
hVal=0x00000EC2 hNext=0x00000EC1 "2"="{2ABD8635-9808-4c4c-943B-8173B805FD40}"
hVal=0x00000EC1 hNext=0x00000EC0 "3"="{0D519EC6-315A-4693-AF1B-B2DA865AC1C7}"
hVal=0x00000EC0 hNext=0x00000EBF "4"="{69E9215B-91B0-461b-A3B6-165EBA32DAE1}"
hVal=0x00000EBF hNext=0x00000000 "5"="{B7A5E609-3E46-442d-8D32-65926EDA6795}"
So you can copy / paste to another file for later use. Datatypes are correctly identified in usual rgu syntax.