Tuesday, December 23, 2008

saga of corrupt pst file

K's S had a corrupt pst file, not opening in Outlook. Googled and passed on the following gyan:

Techrepublic points to MS knowledgebase and says pst max filesize is 2 GB
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-1052339.html (BTW, the link is correct - it is techrepublic.com.com....)

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q197315
also says the same thing,
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q296088
mentions that it affects
  • Microsoft Outlook 2000 Standard Edition
  • Microsoft Outlook 2002 Standard Edition
  • Microsoft Outlook 98 Standard Edition
  • Microsoft Outlook 97 Standard Edition
Googling for 5 GB pst file, found
"I'd suggest using Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows to do the conversion. It creates MBOX files, and it's free. I've used it to migrate 5 GB of PST files to mail.app for my wife and myself."
from comments at http://www.davidalison.com/2008/05/outlook-pst-files-and-mac-conversion.html

According to http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=1401989&page=12 last line,
"server side .pst tools don't support .pst files larger than 2gb. "
So there may have been some corruption if the file has gone through such tools.

Some more possibilities are listed in the comments of:
http://weblogs.asp.net/bleroy/archive/2007/06/27/outlook-pst-file-repair-tool.aspx
which say
Since this is paid sw, you could try thunderbird first, and later export back to outlook if necessary.

Resolution: Trying the Thunderbird stunt also did not work, many folders had junk characters and so on. It turned out that the file had become corrupted while being copied to the laptop. S went back to office, copied it again, this time it worked fine.

2 comments:

  1. I believe S tried AOR first. Anyway, in this case, the issue was that the file was corrupted while copying, so re-copying it solved the problem.

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  2. MS Outlook 2002 and earlier versions limit the size of Personal Folders (PST) file to 2GB. In case the PST file exceeds that limit, you will not be able to open or load it any more. Microsoft provides an external tool pst2gb as a makeshift, which can restore the file to a usable status. But for some cases, this tool will fail in restoring the oversize files. And even if the restore process succeeds, some data will be truncated and lost permanently.
    You can also try an effective PST Repair Tool to overcome 2GB PST file size problem.

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