Repair Broken Microsoft Outlook .PST File

Microsoft Outlook is something that everyone knows very well and is mostly used in offices. It helps us to get and keep in touch with our collegues and seniors in office premises. I know most of them reading this post are or must be working somewhere in an organization. They may be exchanging many mail in a day. Some of them will be exchanging some important files or anything. But what if while sending the mail the mail get corrupted. Or more thatn that the .pst gets corrupted. The .pst file is the one which contains all your mail. Your next step will be Googling for some software or ways to recover it. There are many softwares available on the internet. Most of them are piad and most of them are of no use.

Then what? But the best part is that, Microsoft itself provides us a recovery tool along with the office installation in Windows 7. This tool can fix the broken .pst file. I know some of the things are knowingly kept secret. And this is not the one that that is hidden from the Microsoft, there are many. One was just reveled in the previous post of hidden win7 themes.

You can also find the explanation in Windows website but its a bit confusing. But if your .pst file is more than 2gb then this tool wont work. You have to use the method explained in Microsoft's Website here for truncating the .pst file above 2GB. After following this steps, explained in the Microsoft's website you can use this tool.

Scanpst can repair the following items -

• Calendar
• Contacts
• Deleted Items
• Inbox
• Journal
• Notes
• Outbox
• Sent Items
• Tasks

Locate the repair tool in your Windows 7:

1. Go to "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\" from run window.


2. In this folder search for the file "scanpst.exe" and run it.

3. It will ask you for the location of broken file. Reopen the Microsoft Outlook, when the error message is displayed, the path of the broken file is also displayed. Look the image below.

4. Browse that path and add the file in scanpst.exe.

5. After the process a file will be generated with all the details of the scan. The Repair will be active, if errors are found.

6. Click on the Repair and it will start the Repeat process.
Sometimes the pc will be hang or an "Not Responding" message will be displayed on title bar. Let it be, dont do anything.

7. Once the repair process is completed, it will display a message of "Repair completed".

Now you will be able to open the Outlook without any prob.

Note: The path displayed above, where the scanpst.exe is located, is for Win 7. For other OS use the following paths:

Outlook 2007
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\

Outlook 2003
C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\<locale ID>\

Outlook 2002/XP
C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MAPI\<locale ID>\

Outlook 2000
C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MAPI\<locale ID>\NT\

Outlook 97 / Outlook 98
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Windows Messaging\

Hope you like this post. If yes, please Like or Comment. For any queries please contact me on "bookofknowledge.blog@gmail.com"

Cheers!!!