IT maintenance in bangkok

Situation: A customer had many files in his My Documents which was set to synchronize with his Windows server using Offline Files.  Windows crashed,  we could not get the existing files back nor from the server nor from the computer.

For many of the files, the only copy was on the hard drive.  But with offline files, it does not store them in their naitive format, it is some compressed format in the %SYSTEMROOT%\CSC directory.

The solution consit of using CSCCMD command to forcably remove local copies of offline files to network shares that no longer exist.  We thought, maybe the same program can extract these files too... and it works.

You need to download version 1.1 of CSCCMD.EXE!

• Official MS Location requires contacting MPSS: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/884739
• Alternate location: not available

Use a working computer with the same version and service pack level of Windows XP.

Copy the %SYSTEMROOT%\CSC directory contents from the old hard drive to the same location on the working computer.

Open a command prompt and:

1. Type csccmd /enable
2. Create a directory, for example D:\Recover
3. Type csccmd /extract /target:D:\Recover /recurse
4. The files will be extracted from their compressed offline files format back to their original format!