[dba-Tech] Outlook PST troubles

John,

That's very generous of you, John.  I'll have Janet contact you about
your suggestions.  Her boss let her pay $50 for a repair tool but I
don't know which one.  Whichever one it was didn't do the trick
because it simply froze at the start of the recovery process.

It was weird: I witnessed the PC freezing.  For example, I'd found a
tip that suggested using the normal Windows copy capability to copy
the PST file.  We did that, but the PC froze during the copy.  After
rebooting, we used Scanpst.exe and it worked successfully on that
copy...but there was no sent mail, etc.  Scanpst.exe simply froze on
the original.

When I say "froze" or "locked up", I should be more specific.  When
running that $50 repair tool, the dialog box could be moved with the
mouse.  But right-clicking the Windows task bar did not produce the
context menu.  Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del cleared the desktop as usual, but
the Windows Security menu did not appear.  The only option was turning
off the power.

Isn't Outlook in some ways like Access?  That is, all email and
settings and all are stored in one massive PST file, where in Access
everything is stored in the MDB.  I'm puzzled that Access seems to
have so many ways of dealing with MDB corruption but Outlook does not.

There's no "Handling Corrupt Outlook files for Dummies" is there?

Steve Erbach
Neenah, WI


On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 3:46 PM, John Bartow <john at winhaven.net> wrote:
> Hi Steve,
> Since you have the Outlook up and working you might want to try importing
> specific folders into the new Outlook file from the original .pst file using
> the built-in import facility.
>
> If that doesn't work and you actually need to recover the sent mail then try
> Kernel Outlook Recovery. I forget what it costs but if it's too much to part
> with send me the file on a CD and I'll run mine on it.
>
> John B.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com
> [mailto:dba-tech-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Steve Erbach
> Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2009 2:42 PM
> To: Discussion of Hardware and Software issues
> Subject: [dba-Tech] Outlook PST troubles
>
> Dear Group,
>
> My wife, Janet, has been having trouble at work with a large Outlook
> PST file...about 500 MB in size.  They don't use Microsoft Exchange on
> their server (they've got Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 on an
> HP server); they use one PC with Outlook to gather their messages.  Up
> until a few days ago, they'd left copies of all messages on the
> server.  They stopped doing that and the server downloaded 14,000 or
> so messages to Outlook...so the PST plumped up quickly.  I think they
> did that on Thursday or Friday last week.