Recovering broken Outlook 2003 archive

Drake Chambers

I have an Outlook .pst file, generated using Outlook 2003, that's over 2 gigs. It's documented that when the file gets that big, it breaks and can no longer be opened. There are some critical emails in this archive that I need to access. I'm currently running Outlook 2007.

If I run Microsoft's repair utility, SCANPST.EXE, it runs, says it's repaired, but the file still won't open.

They provide another utility for reducing the size of pst files over 2 gigs called 2GB152.EXE. I am able to run that and output a new, smaller file. Theoretically it's going to be missing some data but chances that it's the exact email I'm looking for are slim. After it runs, however, it instructs me to run SCANPST.EXE in order to make the file readable. If I run the repair on the newly-generated smaller file, I get a message that there was an error and no changes were made to the file.

This makes me sad. Any ideas for a next step?

Djeet

You could try importing the PST into a new mailbox (on the server). Not saying it would work, but it's an alternative to trying to open the PST locally in outlook. If it works it may also (permanently) increase the size of priv.edb, so that's something to consider.

Drake Chambers

I'm in a large office with relatively ridiculous back-end tech support so I'm hoping for a local solution if one exists. In the meantime I'll hope to catch one of the tech guys in the lobby in the hopes that we can talk about it off-the-record. Thanks for that recommendation though.

Any other ideas for local tinkering I can do?

Djeet

All I can think of off the top of my head would be to try to find a 3rd party PST reader to try to extract the mail item, or truncate the PST file. I haven't used one so I cannot recommend any in particular.

There is a system admins thread in Moe's and you can try looking for more targetted help there if you don't get adequate help here.

Tofystedeth

I've had to deal with this before. It's a pain and a half. An updated Outlook 2003 would simply stop being able to send, receive, or otherwise manipulate email when it approached the limit (though it would give a cryptic error message that wouldn't indicate the root cause unless you were familiar with it). Ones without that patch would gleefully go right past that limit and break things.

I've used the 2GB152 tool to fix one, but I had to cut off a pretty large chunk ( I think about 200-300 MB) in order to get it working after running scanpst. You may try seeing if you can get a hold of the scanpst from the appropriate Office version. Not sure if it makes a difference.