Opening recovered pst files

[Mary Lee]

I had to clear some room on my laptop hard drive, so I moved all of my
documents and large pst files to an external drive. I moved them again to
another external drive, deleted them from the first external drive, then
physically dropped the external drive they were on while it was running. (I
know, I know - always have everything in two places - even for a day!) The
shop says that the dropped disk won't even spin, so I had the deleted files
recovered from the first external drive. I can see them - they look like they
are there, but Outlook does not recognize them. I ran scanpst.exe, but got
the message "An error has occurred; scanning is stopped; no change has been
made to your pst file."
Am I just sunk, or is there yet another possibility to try? I see some
software out there making some claims, but does anyone have any experience
with this specific problem?
Thanks!

 

[Roady [MVP]]

The pst-file probably did not get recovered completely and indeed is
damaged. These type of corruption is often too much for scanpst.exe to fix
and you'll need a 3rd party recovery tool.

Personally I had good results with Advanced Outlook Repair from DataNumen;
http://addins.howto-outlook.com/datanumen_outlookrepair
If you decide to order use DNC-PUXB-HT to get a discount.

Another good recovery tool is OutlookFIX from CimaWare;
http://addins.howto-outlook.com/cimaware_outlookfix