Question : recovering *Contacts* from an old .OST file???

I fear I may know the answer to this question ("not possible") but I thought I would ask the experts...

The situation is this - the Exhange servers that hosted the email acct. in question are gone (i.e., the company has gone out of business).  Emails stored in personal folders on local hard drives (i.e, in .PST files) are saved / recovered - no problem.  

The issue is folks are also looking to recover the *Contacts* (and in some cases Calendar data - although Contacts are def. most important) in their .OST files, which they still have on their local hard drives.

This must be done without access to the orig. Exchange server.

I have found a util on ZDNET called "Exchange Recovery" that gives great demo *but* they want $500 for the working version.  Unfortunately, we are talking about people who have just lost their livelihood due to the company closing.  It's hard for them to justify spending the $500.

Does anyone know how one can import/extract/recover the Contacts contained with an offline .OST folder.

[ NOTE - I am NOT talking about .PST files - that's not the issue.  Recovery of the data within the .OST files is the thing that I cannot figure out. ]

Thanks in advance.

Answer : recovering *Contacts* from an old .OST file???

Had the same problem and put it off a while ago...your thread reminded me of the old .ost file I had lying around so I decided to give another try...

Found the following threads relating to the topic (after trying some local tweaking):

http://www.tek-tips.com/gviewthread.cfm/lev2/95/lev3/96/pid/94/qid/4153

I followed jwebb's 5/21/01 posted suggestion and it worked for me.

You will need access to the Inbox Repair Tool - you should have it already - In my case I found it in: C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\Mapi\1033\NT\SCANPST.EXE

The other tool mentioned is an old version of ost2pst.exe. That can be found here: http://www.swynk.com/friends/nicholson/utilities.asp

1) Backup the .ost file.
2) Run ost2pst.exe - it has a quick install
3) Try the .pst
4) If the .pst doesn't work, run the Inbox Repair Tool
5) Open Outlook and select Open .pst.

It should work...good luck.