I use Outlook personal folder to download my mails from the Microsoft exchange server. This personal folder is in fact a file that has a .pst extension. All my mails are downloaded and stored in this .pst file. Once you copy this .pst file and configure an outlook on another machine with this, you retain all your mails. So in a way a .pst is nothing but a file that stores all your mail data.

During the Outlook start up process it usually looks for the .pst file location and shows up all stored mails. And then downloads new mails and stores in the .pst file.

One fine morning I unlocked my computer and started Outlook. But it failed because it was not able to reload the .pst file due to some cyclic redundancy check (CRC) failure. CRC is a method to check the error in data. The failure may occur due to bad storage media or sometimes due to inclusion of data with wrong checksum. May be something missing while the data is being written on the media.

Now this means, I have lost my .pst file and in a nutshell I lost all my mails! Usually I take regular backups of the .pst file but this time there were very important mails that were not backed up. So I wanted all my data to be retained and the same .pst file back and working.

I found a cool utility included in the MS Office. This is an .exe file that corrects the data stored in the .pst file and restores it in way to pass the CRC. This utility is known as ScanPST.

You can find this utility at the following location in your computer -

C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice12SCANPST.EXE

I hope this helps many of you who usually face this problem.

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