Can't Open Outlook 2000 pst file 1

[ITSurvivor]

Hello All,

I have a user whose pst file is a little over 2GB and now we can't open it or run the scanpst program to fix it. When trying to run the scanpst program it bombed by giving the "An error has occurred which caused the scan to be stopped." error message.

Anyone has any ideas how to recover that pst file. Any help really appreciated.

Thanks,

Richard

 

[smah]

Save a backup copy of the existing pst (just in case), then give this a try

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088

 

[ITSurvivor]

Thanks smah, I did download the file and ran it against the huge pst file. Now I am running the scanpst file against the recovered file. Will keep you all posted.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Richard

 

[jsteph]

smah,
That's a great link. I have a couple of questions though. Do .Ost files have the same limit, and if so, does it work on .Ost files? I guess that if one has an .ost then you still should have the data available on the exchange server, but suppose it's been archived and is off on tape somewhere...I guess it's more of an academic question.

Also, I tried to test that on a <1.9 gig file just to test it so I would have some familiarity if I need it for a .pst file, and it wouldn't even let me test--it said my file wasn't big enough. I would think they'd just let you run it anyway for exactly that purpose--to test. Oh well.
--Jim

 

[ITSurvivor]

Hello smah,

It works. Thank you and all.

Richard

 

[smah]

Glad that resolved it.

Yes, the crop tool will work on .ost files as well, but I don't personally know of anyone who has gotten an .ost file that big. This tool just discards anything beyond the 2Gb, so if using this tool is the only fix, you can guarantee that something has been lost and there's no way to tell what it was. With Outlook 2003, a new file format was introduced that will allow larger .pst files, but upgraders would still be using the old format unless they manually converted.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830336/en-us