I had a situation where a friend of mine had many files in her My Documents which was set to synchronize with her SBS server using Offline Files. Well her Windows install crashed and no matter what she tried she could not get the existing Windows install to repair.

This was her home laptop and she had not synchronized with the server for a few months. For many of the files the only copy was on her 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.

You need to download version 1.1 of CSCCMD.EXE!
http://www.jacksontechnical.com/pubf...sccmd_v1.1.zip


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.

On the working machine open a command prompt.

Type csccmd /enable

Create a target directory for example mkdir C:\Restore

Type csccmd.exe /extract /target:C:\Restore /recurse

Your files will be extracted from their compresses offline files format back to their original format.