Sandy said:
Outlook error says my inbox folder is damaged and need to rund scanpst to
correct. I cannot find the outlook.pst file where outlook says it is. I ran
search to find it cannot find on my hard drive.
Is there a way to restore or create a new outlook.pst file so I can start
over?
I don't have a backup of this file. So I think I may have to start over with
a new outlook.pst file.
any help woulb be appreciated.
thanks
sandy h.
Outlook only looks in the path it is configured to look (Tools ->
Options -> Maintenance -> Store folder). If the .pst did not exist in
that path, you would get an error from Outlook saying that it could not
locate your message store. For it to say that it is corrupted means it
*did* find the .pst file. Make sure you include hidden files/folders
when searching.
Did you ever convert from the old ANSI .pst file format (which had a
limit of 2GB for size) to the new Unicode .pst file format? Once you
find the .pst file, how big is it? If you never converted, the max size
for an ANSI .pst file is 2GB (1.87GiB). Once you reach or exceed that
size, you begin to corrupt that file. You will need to delete items
from your message store (if you can get it to open) and then compact
that file, or move them into another .pst archival file (and then still
run compact on your current message store). Deleted items are simply
not displayed in Outlook but they still exist in the .pst file. You
won't reduce the size of the .pst file until you physically purge the
delete-marked items by compacting your message store.
If you cannot open your corrupted message store (.pst file) in Outlook,
you will either have to try to fix it using ScanPST or by recovering an
older copy of the .pst file from your backups. If you don't do backups,
you deem your data as worthless or reproducible. To run ScanPST, load
any of the Office components (Word, Excel) and use their Help -> Repair
menu. You may need the install CD (or a folder where install files were
saved) due to prompting from the repair to recover program files from
there. Read the following KB articles:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/287497/en-us
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/272227/en-us
There is no guarantee the ScanPST tool will fix a corrupted .pst file.
It may be damaged beyond the capability of this utility to fix it. In
that case, you need to retrieve a prior uncorrupted copy of your .pst
file from your backups.
