Yesterday, I spent 6 hours trying to rebuild my Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 Entourage database, 2 of them on the phone with Microsoft.
All is now resolved, but I thought I should share what I learned and did so others might avoid having the same headache. The problem began when I could not display the calendar in calendar view. I kept getting errors saying that Entourage could not display the content because of an error, but id didn¹t give an error number or any useful info. My email, addresses and task list all functioned okay. I used the database utility (starting Entourage with Option held down to start the utility). It tested and told me problems were found with the database and I should rebuild it. It took nearly an hour to get through step 5/5, and at the end, the spinning wheel came up and stayed up. There was a message saying the database was being rebuilt, but no confirmation came that it was complete. I used Command/Option/escape to see if the program had crashed and it told me it was not responding. A week earlier, I had a problem where the database also got corrupted and would not rebuild. Then, I searched on Google and learned that that could happen due to a lack of free space on the hard drive. I had under 20 GB free, so, during the earlier incident, after I deleted about 10 GB and the database rebuilt. But this time, yesterday, I did drastic deletions to clear another 10 GB and the problem persisted. I quit the database utility and repeated the above steps 3 times to no avail. Finally, I found a phone number to call for Microsoft Support: 800 936-5700. They answered surprising fast and luckily they told me I had one incident remaining on my support program so I would not be charged the $49 such calls normally cost. I then spoke with a tech named Jonathan. He had me do the following: In Finder, go to users/[my home directory)/library/preferences and delete all files that included (the asterik is a wildcard that stands for anything): com.microsoft.* com.entourage.* And to delete the microsoft folder that was in that path. I then had to restart my computer and rebuilt the database. It again went through step 5/5 and the spinning wheel kept spinning. Jonathan made sure I was running no other programs and he didn¹t want me to use Command/Option/escape to see if the program had crashed. We got off the phone and I waited. After 2 hours, I called again. This time I was on hold for 30 mins, got disconnected and called again. Someone else (since Jonathan was on another call) told me to keep waiting and to avoid opening other programs for that would slow the process down further. It took 2.5 hours, but finally it said the rebuild was successful and, when I opened Entrourage, my calendar displayed correctly. I learned the reason the rebuild took so long was that my database was nearly 22 GB. Normally they are <5 Gb. You can see the size by going in Finder to /documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 identities/Identity 1/database and then command click/get info. Jonathan later called me back and told me that what made my database so large was probably due to having many old saved attachments. I deleted them all by going to documents/Microsoft User Data/Saved Attachments. I also deleted many folders within that directory. When I was done, my database was 2.5 GB. I asked how I could back up my database in the future. Jonathan said to manually go to File/Export and that would create a file called identity.rge. I saved that to my hard drive and made sure the file got backed up as part of my regular backup of documents to an off-site repository. I see there are different, more complex instructions for backing up Entourage here: http://www.entourage.mvps.org/database/backup.html. Hope this helps you avoid the headache I had. -- YouTalk mailing list List information: http://nine.pairlist.net/support_options/list.html List moderator: [email protected], [email protected] To unsubscribe: mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe
