Possible to restore corrupt .pst file?

[calamitycj]

One of our managers has a now corrupt .pst file. It corrupted most likely due to the size- 1.96 gigs! Scanpst.exe is no help on this one. Though I know how we could have prevented this... Is there a way to recover at this point?

Hopefully yours,

Calamity

 

[slirper]

There is not much hope to be honest. I am assuming your pst is on a local machine so can't be restored from back-up.

What you can try is:

using a file splitter such as axman to split the file to smaller sizes. Then use scan.pst to try and restore each split file.

I did this once a few years ago and it did recover a few e-mails but not many so wasn't worth it.

 

[mscallisto]

First there's a M/S program that truncates the pst to 2 gig is the pst exceeds 2 gig which doesn't seem to be your case.

Fo your case I need to know if you can drag and drop (cut and paste) from your pst to a second (new) pst.

we've had success doing this followed by a pst compress.

 

[calamitycj]

I did copy and paste it onto the network so that I could mess with it from another machine. I tried to import it into Outlook on that new machine, but could not due to the corruption. Are you saying to paste it into the outlook folder itself?

 

[smah]

Here's the crop tool that mscallisto referred to. Even though your pst file isn't bigger than 2 Gb, it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot at this point.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;296088

 

[mscallisto]

SMAH has pointed you to the Pst2gb.exe I referred to, thanks SMAH.

What I had to do for a corrupt pst that exceeded 2gB was run the pst2gb program that corrected the problem.

What I did for a corrupt pst that had not exceeded 2gB and was not fixed using scanpst.exe was the following.

Created a new pst.

From the corrupt pst I dragged and dropped folders to the new pst (actually I did this for a few large folders just to free up some space on the corrupt pst. the file was so corrupt or full it would not allow me to delete files or folders)

Finally I did a "compact now" on the corrupt pst and after about an hour or so of compacting, the pst was restored.

Hopefully you will be as fortunate.

The person I did this for now follows the two golden rules of pst's 1) keep them well under 2gB and 2) store them someplace where they will be backed-up frequently, preferrably on another hard drive or file server.

much luck

 

[Francodepaw]

Just a heads up. If you are running Office XP (Outlook 2002) with no service packs, the actually max PST file size was decreased to 1.82G and Increased back to 2G with the release of Service Pack 1 for Office XP. I had a user with a corrupt pst at 1.8 something had to upgrade to SP1 and fixed the prob.

PAW