Problem with Outlook 2011 Main Identity after moving to new cloned drive.

[ChinaMiner]

All,

I have a mid-2007 Apple MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.2 15-Inch (Santa Rosa) with OSX 10.6.8. The 120GB hard drive was becoming a problem in terms of space (works perfectly) so I cloned the drive using the industry standard software (name of which escapes me) and swapped in a much newer 250GB drive.

The machine appears to function optimally after the upgrade. I have used most of my applications without incident using the new cloned drive. However, when I attempted to load Outlook 2011, I got a message that there was a problem with the Main Identity, and MS Database Utility came up. My Outlook 2011 is fully up-to-date in terms of MS updates.

MSDU promptly locked up on Step 3 when it tried to rebuild the identity. Now the main Main Identity loads up an inbox with 0 messages. The backup Main Identity causes the same error state (locked up).

I can see all the messages are still on my machine when I, for instance, use Finder (clicking on a message from today pops up the warning that that message isn't associated with the Main Identity, which is obviously trashed):

1) Is there some easy fix to this? and/or
2) Can I have Outlook scan the machine for messages to slurp into the main identity? I must say that the "identity" concept has been most unsatisfactory, with Outlook at some point having associated a large number of older messages with another identity that I no longer use for no reason known to me.

Any thoughts on the foregoing warmly welcomed. (I'd even consider alternative email programs. I like Office for Mac excepting Outlook).

Thanks,

CM

[ChinaMiner]

Quick update...the "Main Identity" backup database successfully was repaired, but it's got a profile that's a month old.

I have a backup of my disk, obviously, since the current disk is a clone: how can I import the 'Main Identity' from a backup, since, as mentioned, the 'Main Identity' on this machine is trashed?

Thanks for any help.