Welcome to AOHell the Fun Never Stops

Factual Questions
1

The girlfriend-person is an AOL user (Windows 98). Several screen names, each with their own set of bookmarks (Favorite Places) and each with an immense collection of old Inbox and Outbox email. All of this stuff seems to be saved in folder called “Organize” in the AOL folder.

We had to nuke her hard drive and reinstall everything this weekend. We were clever enough to back up the “organize” folder. Reinstalled AOL 6 and went through the automatic wizard-thingie to put her old accounts on the new computer, which it does–you specify one screen name and it gets the whole account’s collection thereof. Quit AOL, copy contents of backed-up “Organize” to newly installed “Organize”, replacing same-named files. Launch AOL. Series of 5 evil messages: “Could not load a file, will restore from backup”. Arrive at logon screen. Poke around a bit, switch screen names, etc. Hmm. Seems the one screen name we logged in under to set up the accoun during the “wizard” process is lacking all of its old email and its Favorite Places. The other screen names, on the other hand, are doing well.

Lather, rinse, repeat several times over, with diminishing returns. This includes officially uninstalling AOL and also simply renaming the last install to “NotQuiteAOL” or whatever and reinstalling to a new location. Found a Backup folder within AOL folder and deleted files from within. Doesn’t seem to help. Somehow, SOMEWHERE, this bloody program has an annoyingly good memory for what was in Favorite Places and Filing Cabinet the last time the account was used, and it doesn’t respond well to manual copy and replace maneuvers.

Anyone know how one efficiently restores the full use of a copy of the “Organize” folder, e.g., after reformatting a hard drive?

Girlfriend is sulking in the bed now, back turned, stating that she should’ve just tossed the computer in the trash instead.

2

I recommend calling AOL. I am sure they will be able to solve your problem. If you contact a tech that has no knowledge of your problem calmly hang up and call again to reach a technician knowledgeable with your difficulty.

3

I hate to sound like a jerk, but thats not really a big deal. So what if a few links or e-mails are lost? You can find them again or re-contact people. When i had aol, somebody used an old screenname(yes,one I had deleted but was connected to my account) to send out spam mail. Subsequently they terminated my service. Now I use Worldnet. Hopefully contacing aol for help with remedy some problems,but who knwos for sure.

4

ROFL!!!

5

Sorry I don’t have anything really useful to add, but here’s a personal message for Sweetie:

Hope the evening’s not a total loss, Hunter. :smiley:
And special message to Poiloin:

:smiley:

6

[WINDOWS TIPS MODE]
Did you know…

…that you can paste a folder directly onto the link to an executable file and it will launch to try to open and process all the files in the folder?

[/WINDOWS TIPS MODE]
I didn’t know that, I’m a Mac person, and we don’t copy and paste files, we drag & drop 'em. (3rd party utilities will let you copy and paste them, but our interface is more geared to manipulating files “physically”). So I can’t say it didn’t do any good to call AOL tech support–I learned the above interesting little factoid. He was unable to help me fix the problem, but my conversation with him (and the steps he walked me through) got me thinking and I managed to rescue the data on my own later on.

So…it turns out that America Online doesn’t merely save to and access whatever files sit in the “Organize” folder; the first time any particular screen name is launched, it (in some unknown fashion) initializes and incorporates the files for that screen name from the “Organize” folder, and if it can accept them once, it has them; otherwise it attempts to “restore” them (data loss). AND it appears that AOL can only perform this initialization-and-incorporation activity on a limited number of megabytes’ worth of files, so by throwing a whole big ugly folder at it, I was overwhelming AOL. What worked was copying in one file at a time from the backup to the current active “Organize” directory.

:slight_smile:

PS–this was a godawful weekend! Damn Compaq! They don’t come with a copy of Windows, they come with a “restore” CD (the Presario laptop she uses did at any rate) and to do anything useful with it (i.e., to reinstall Windows cuz current copy is badly hosed) you have to say OK to nuking the whole damn hard drive. And would you believe this operation took up 22 hours!!! (that doesn’t include two periods of sleep interspersed in the latter portion of it). I can’t believe how difficult it is to get software working again when you have the program folders and data folders backed up (and in most cases have the installers as well).

Damn Compaq in triplicate! Their damn “restore” CD does not warn you that you will need to have your hands on the 25-digit secret installation code that was printed on some long-forgotten piece of paper that was in the box with the laptop purchased 3 years ago! Nope, hello, welcome to your newly reformatted and restored hard drive, sure hope you can find the piece of paper or you’ve got a computer you can’t use, ha ha ha!

Well, at least my girlfriend has stopped glaring daggers at me :slight_smile:

7

I installed AOL 6 and it glitched and now it doesn’t have a cut off timer! :smiley: :D!

AOL stores much on your hard drive, so if you reload a new version, on a new computer, probably not much will transfer over. The only other way is to locate the files on your backup, open the appropriate AOL folder and copy them over there. It can be done. A phone call to AOL will let you know which folder they are in and how to get to them. AOL spreads things around in odd folders.

8

RyanD004:

Nope, not from the same planet here. My Mac went down in flames in August, talk about your coincidences; the operating system, about 4 dozen programs, and various folders that reside inside the System Folder also went down without a trace. (worst case of corrupted Extents and Catalog I’ve ever seen). I was fortunate to have other bootable partitions, plus a 3-month old backup of the System Folder, and other copies of the program software on year-old backups or on another computer; and restoring programs on a Mac is easy. But my email program, Eudora, places its Eudora folder–the place where the Inbox and Outbox and all the prefs and filters and whatnot are stored–in the System Folder, so I lost 3 months’ worth.

“So what if a few links or emails are lost?” I’ll tell you what. I ran Norton Utilities on the hard drive for 3 passes and saved every text fragment with my email address in it. Then repeated with TechTool Pro. Then repeated with an old copy of MacTools. Ended up with 3.5 gigabytes of text files with useful names like “Text File 794”. Email intermingled with browser cache, README files, temp files from Filemaker databases, etc etc. Programmed a routine in BBEdit, QuicKeys, AppleScript, FileMaker, and Eudora to isolate the email messages, clip them into separate text files named so as to reflect the sender or recipient name, date, & whether or not they were outbound or inbound, then imported their contents into Filemaker, which parsed out the To, From, Subject, and Body from the raw text string and send them to myself; then hacked the headers in Eudora to set the date to the original and the sender name (or recipient name) to the original as well.

And considered myself damn lucky once it was over and I had all my emails back where they belonged, I’m telling you!

That’s “what if”. Some of us can’t live without our records. Some of us are data-packrats. Some of us have girlfriends who are data-packrats.

9

Easy, simply get an ISP that isn’t AOL. It’s 2001 and finding a local and cheap ISP is not as hard as it used to be back in the day. Start again.
AOL’s problem is putting all eggs in one basket.
AOL is just training wheels for the internet, one has to move on and see different things without dealing with byzantine TOS.

10

Yeah, but if you live out in the “gray areas”, in the “in-between” spaces on the map, finding a local and cheap ISP that has local, non-long-distance access numbers is a whole 'nother ball game.

And I’m not particularly out in the Boonies, either–just in the Gray Area between Springfield and Champaign-Urbana, where many ISPs with local access numbers fear to roam.

11

ok, there are a couple things I ahve read that I wanna back up. First, I couldn’t agree with Cisco more.

Then, I am also gonna have to agree with heptapod. AOL really is not a good ISP if you think you can handle a stand-alone browser (IE is very eay to use, and so is Netscape). There are certainly several reasons for this. AOL has some of the most innefficient tech support around. Not only do you have to wait, on hold, for hours, upon hours, even at non-peak times (one would imagine 4am would be an appropriate time to call, but lo-and-behold). Then, after you finally DO get connected to some flake on AOLs side, the end up having to re-derict you to another tech guys becuase the first one was either unqualified, or becuase you picked the wrong of many, vauge catagories.

Another minus in AOLs direction, those stupid Favorite places. In regular IE, or even Netscape, you can simply go to a folder in your IE install, appropriatly called “Favorites”, and you can see all of your favorites right there, and the backup wil usually fit on a single floppy disk. There is nothing out there easier to backup than that.

Want more? AOL is the number 1 targeted ISP by malicious hackers. Interested in using IRC? If so, most of the channels you’ll find there, well, maybe not most, but certainly a lot, will have all AOL users blocked and banned from their Channel. This doesn’t sound like a problem? Try using Internet Explorer, outside of AOL. Notice anything different? That’s right. If the hackers out there aren’t gonna be messing with you because of your ISP, your ISP will be messing with you. They will change SO many setting, without your consent, in the registry, and even simple things like the Title bar of IE. AOL is very invasive, as far as ISPs go.

Duck Duck Goose complains about the lack of local-access numbers for smaller ISPs. Have you checked into Earthlink? It is my understanding that earthlink has more local numbers than any other ISP (including AOL). PLUS you get a normal ISP, and pretty decent tech support. But, if you want my opnion, go with some sort of broadband. That way you get some really fast access, and never EVER will you hear another busy tone…

But that’s just my two cents… :smiley:

12

Evnglion, yeah, I know, I know. AOL sucks. The problem is, she has years and years’ worth of email IN and OUT in several different screen names, all those favorite places (different sets in each), and a thousand-some-odd people on this planet who have her AOL address.

I’d love to switch her over to Netscape or Opera, Eudora, and verizon (since we get free email as a side effect of the DSL). Heck, I’d love to switch her over to Macintosh for that matter :wink:

Ain’t gonna happen. She’d go along with that if and only if I could present her with an interface in Opera or Netscape with all of her favorite places brought over from AOL (neatly separated by original AOL username), THAT’S the EASY part…plus all her 6000-some-odd pieces of email neatly brought over into Eudora, with the dates and the “To” headers and/or the “From” headers reflecting the original, and, of course, separated out into mailboxes according to original AOL username, THAT’s DO-ABLE although not easy…plus remap her old AOL email addresses so that email addressed to any of them is auto-forwarded to an address that Eudora can receive, or else set up Eudora to retrieve her AOL email…and THAT, my friend, I cannot do!

(But tune in for further developments. She isn’t happy with the PC, with AOL, or with Windows any more, so anything is possible. But learning new things, or changing anything that works, isn’t her style)

13

yeah, I hear that. There is another suggestion I ahve. I cannot remember the name of the program, but I once found something that converts AOL favorites into IE or Netscape faorites. This is a really helpful tool for people like your gf. I would bet there is also something out there that would convert the email to an Outlook format as well… try a google search, or even a ZDNet Files… good luck

14

Heh, why use MacOS or Windows? Install linux with KDE and use the Aqua theme. Better yet if you’re such a die hard mac zealot have her use OSX.

15

<<The problem is, she has years and years’ worth of email IN and OUT in several different screen names, all those favorite places (different sets in each), and a thousand-some-odd people on this planet who have her AOL address. >>

OK, here’s a couple of things to try. You already did the copying in of the Organize folder after launching AOL and signing on, which is the correct order, but your quote above kinda worries me.

If she has really thousands of emails and saved stuff, the files may have corrupted at some point. Try this: stick the copied Organize folder (the one with all the info) somewhere else, like the desktop. Open it, and look for the files with the same exact names as her screennames. (You’ll see ones with other extensions, like .arl and such, but you want the ones without ANY extensions.) Rename those files to herscreennames.pfc and at that point, you can open them within the AOL software by just going to File>Open. By doing that, she’ll be able to save new mail, and create Favorites and such, but she’ll have accessible her old stored files in another window. I’d really recommend cleaning out old email and backing up the Organize folder about once a month, if she’s got way important stuff there.

You didn’t happen to save the BACKUP folder from the old copy of AOL, did you? If this fails and you still can’t open the files as .pfc, then you’d find hopefully undamaged copies of the same files (except a bit less recent) in the BACKUP folder. AOL 6.0 automatically backs up the saved files every month unless you set it to do otherwise.

Good luck…

Corr

16

http://www.bookmarksync.com/ . I just cancelled AOL and this worked very well.

17

I’d just like to say that AOL is probably one of the worst ISPs out there, and getting something else is probably a good idea. That said, I’d like to come to the defense of AOL for a few moments.

First of all, the best way to deal with Tech Support is to not ever have to call them or talk to them. I’ve had AOL for 5+ years and I’ve only had to call them once when I changed something and forgot my password. Keep your computer well maintained, backup what you can and don’t do stupid stuff. That way, you minimize your chance of coming across a problem you need help solving.

Next, you don’t have to use AOL’s proprietary browser. It’s a complete joke and is entirely unstable. You can use IE or Netscape or any other browser you want. I don’t know if they change your registry to say AOL propaganda if you install from an AOL disc but my non-AOL disc version only says Microsoft Internet Explorer in the title bar. It has yet to invade my system. In fact, it’s not invasive at all.

The worst thing I find is that the speed seriously lacks at times and the ping times are pretty mediocre. Otherwise, I have had few problems with AOL.

18

<<I don’t know if they change your registry to say AOL propaganda if you install from an AOL disc but my non-AOL disc version only says Microsoft Internet Explorer in the title bar. >>

Only happens if you update Internet Explorer from an AOL CD. If you do that and don’t like it, just go into the add/remove control panel, choose MSIE, and restore it to a previous version, then go online to microsoft.com and update it again.

It’s not any different, just says “brought to you by America Online” in the toolbar. My copy of AOL says “brought to you by Target” because that’s where I picked up the CD to put it on my laptop. (28,8 modem. Not downloading anything there!)

Corr