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Outlook corrupt pst

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dawks

Diamond Member
We have a user here who keeps having problems with her Outlook pst file becoming corrupt. She was running Outlook XP before, and the problem would show up, I'd run the repair tool, and things would work alright. Then a few days or weeks later, it would happen again. After having it occur several times, we decided to upgrade to Outlook 2007. The problem occurred again, and again still. Up to this point I had just been repairing the inbox, and finally decided to create a whole new PST file, and import all the items over. That worked for a while, but it happened yet again today. This time the repair tool is reporting its not repairable.

Is there a way to fix this, and prevent the message from happening again? Any suggestions as to why it is happening in the first place?

I will also note it happened to a few other users around the same time. Although our email server has virus scanning, and we run AVG pro on all the systems.
 
Around 900megabytes. This time around, the file has dropped to ~300megs for some reason.

Update: The file is ~965megs, but when I open outlook, then get the 'corrupt pst' message, the file is shrunk down to ~300megs.. I was able to run the scanpst.exe tool on the ~900meg file before opening it with Outlook, Outlook is then able to open the file without issue.

I still need to find out what the problem is though. Any suggestions?
 
bump, still need some suggestions

We use AVG Pro as our AV program. Might there be an issue there?

I actually found that after running the 'scanpst.exe' tool about 3 months of emails are missing. Any suggestion to get this mail back?

This is really a stupid problem.
 
SCANPST.EXE (Inbox repair utility) will make a backup of your original file as long as you don't choose to skip this option. If you value any messages or contact objects in your mailbox you should NOT skip the backup option!

Check your hardware! Run a CHKDSK on your boot volume - normally this would be at the command prompt:

CHKDSK C: /F /R

Answer the questions and reboot.
 
Originally posted by: Rubycon
SCANPST.EXE (Inbox repair utility) will make a backup of your original file as long as you don't choose to skip this option. If you value any messages or contact objects in your mailbox you should NOT skip the backup option!

Check your hardware! Run a CHKDSK on your boot volume - normally this would be at the command prompt:

CHKDSK C: /F /R

Answer the questions and reboot.
Click to expand...

Yes it makes a backup, but what is the point when the file cannot be opened unless you run the tool?

Hardware is fine, this happened on an older system, and is still happening after we migrated the user to a new system. chkdsk probably wont help since this is a file structure issue, not file system level.

Also, im curious as to why this would happen.. A virus in an email?
 
i've seen with extreme regularity pst.'s go corrupt after 800MB, even though they are said to be able to handle 1gb. in your case your pst is corrupt like rubycon said. if you can open the pst in outlook, my suggestion is you create two other personal folders and split your mail in half.
 
Don't use any paid software to repair PST file when you can try scanpst.exe utility. It's the Inbox Repair tool provided by Microsoft. It can scan corrupt PST files for errors and repair them. If scanpst.exe fails or doesn't work, then only you should try professional software. I can share this blog post here in which you can compare best PST repair or recovery tools available in the market: Blog redacted

I hope the shared information would be helpful here.

Thanks and best regards.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I used to run the backup tool that would make a copy of the pst file and tuck it away in the folder of your choosing. I finally got tired of the issues with POP3 and the PST so I converted all my emails to IMAP and MAPI so if the PST ever croaked on me again all I had to do was correct the corruption and resync the folders with the server.

Office 2010 and earlier was horribly unreliable for me in that area running POP3, however I've had better luck with 2013 and 2016 and IMAP and MAPI. I also keep Thunderbird on all my pc's just in case something stupid happens to my Office installs so I can always access my emails.
 
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