Outlook crash! how to recover outlook.pst?

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We run an older version of Outlook (2000). WHile doing some work on the computer that it run on (Dell 4700 dimension), suddenly many things changed, for reasons that I cannot explain: fonts changed size, Office applications acted as though it was the first time that they were being used, Outlook would not start, color schemes changed etc. I have first repaired, and then re-installed, Outlook on this machine, but am unable to start it. And therefore cannot read the .pst file which has some stuff on it that we would really like to recover.

Since we have another computer, I have tried all combinations of software and .pst files in an unsuccessful attempt to read the .pst file. I have tried several versions of the .pst file (from local backup, from online backup, and the one that was on the failed computer) with two versions of Outlook (2000 and 2007). No luck.

What have I missed? Any ideas as to how to recover?
thanks
Bob Chapman

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How large is the PST file in question and what is the error message you get when you attempt to mount it as a data file for Outlook?

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Thanks for responding, Josh
It’s 1.6GB. The error message is that the file is corrupted, and that we should use SCANPST.EXE to fix it, but that doesn’t work —Scanpst fails to complete.
Bob Chapman

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Hi Bob,

That doesn’t sound promising but we’ll try,

http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/outlook/HA010549331033.aspx

I know you have done the outlined steps of using the Inbox Repair Tool (scanpst.exe) but what do you mean by it failing to complete? Does the system lock-up or the scanpst.exe process crash etc?

Due to the size of the file I am wondering if you are giving it sufficient time to complete as it will rebuild a PST file with the headers/index items it can recover.

You’ve said that older off-line backups are failing to mount also, are they recent to the issue or long term?

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PST files prior to Office 2003 were in an ANSI format and had a limit of 2gb. However, what I have found is that when those files exceed 1.5gb, the chance that these files will become corrupt and unreadable is greatly increased. I work in a very large enterprise environment that has upgraded over the years. I see this sort of situation often from the long term employees on their legacy PST files. While all new files are created in the Unicode format, the older PST files in the ANSI format and are not converted.

I am afraid I cannot offer you much hope. There are commercial repair tools available, but in this sort of instance I have not had much luck on the older ANSI version files

If you have any PST files that exceed 1.5gb, I strongly urge you to move data out of them while they are still readable. You have been fortunate if you have not had additional corruption issues with older PST files that are 1.5gb and above

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Welcome to the forum and thanks for your insight Larry,

Unfortunately it does not inspire much hope but a lesson learned that being up to date is an important consideration with aging software. I had completely forgotten about the 1.5gb issue with them being ANSI format in Outlook 2000 etc.

I haven’t used any of the commercial software for PST recovery so I cannot gauge it’s value Bob.

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Have you tried running checkdisk?

as a last effort, try using this: Oversized PST Crop Tool

The idea would be to trim off the end of the file, in hopes of rescuing as much content as possible. Be sure to make a copy of the file first.

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I have had some success with Outlook Recovery Toolbox (http://www.oemailrecovery.com/outlook-recovery.html). Just recently I used it to recover e-mail from a damaged Outlook 2000 file that was too large.

Sometimes you can do an Import from it, even if you can’t open it directly in Outlook.

John

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