Outlook PST Repair – Repair and recover corrupt Outlook PST file

Microsoft Outlook is an eminent e-mail client that comes along with Microsoft Office Suite. Microsoft Outlook tries to ease down the working mode by performing multiple tasks; still people face difficulty while accessing e-mails and other data. Such kind of behavior is usually seen after the corruption of Outlook PST file. After corruption, execution of any e-mail operation ends with a serious error message. Appearance of error message while using Microsoft Outlook is a serious concern. That is why; Microsoft itself has provided inbuilt solutions in order to resolve the issue of corruption. Use of third party tools, to perform Outlook PST Repair is an ideal solution.

Repair corrupt .pst file when Scanpst.exe utility fails

Generally it is recommended to use the Scanpst.exe utility when Outlook .pst file get corrupted. But Scanpst utility has some specific limitations, like it is not able to repair the files which have the size larger than 2 GB. Also there are possibilities that once the scanpst.exe is used to scan and repair the corrupt pst file then it may further make changes in file because of its repair process. Hence, scanpst.exe does not completely ensure you the recovery of pst file and might also shows some error while repairing the file.

To exemplify the above issue, consider a practical case. Suppose, your Outlook.pst file got corrupted due to unexpected shutdown and when you run Scanpst.exe tool to repair the corrupt Outlook PST file, you received an error message as below:

“An error has occurred which caused the scan to be stopped. No changes have been made to the scanned file.”

This error message indicates that Scanpst.exe utility is not able to scan and repair the corrupt pst file.

One of the reason could be that Scanpst is not properly installed. In that case reinstall the Microsoft Outlook properly. Scanpst.exe also fails to work when the size of .pst file get increased more than 2 GB and start showing the above mentioned error.

One solution to deal with this situation is to use the backup of .pst file. During the scanpst.exe repair process, it creates a backup of original .pst file with name .bak. This .bak file is created in the same folder in which original .pst file is located. This .bak file recover items that scanpst.exe failed to recover. Make a copy of .bak file and rename it with .pst extension. Import the bak.pst file and move other items in it that you have created.

However, if you are still unable to repair damaged .pst file during scanpst.exe repair process then it is better to repair Outlook PST file with the help of a PST repair tool which helps you to recover all Outlook objects.