The cause that time & again lead to PST file corruption remains more or less same as virus infection, application & OS bugs, improper system shutdown & other problem taking place in the system. However, all that make you relax is the availability of outlook’s inbox repair tool as a solution to corrupt PST & helping in rescue of corrupt & damaged data file back.

In a state like this, outlook 2010 will generate error as – “errors have been detected in the file PST”. Following this is a message that suggests using scanpst.exe for solving these issues & safely recreating PST file information back in accessible form.

As per recommended the damaged outlook personal folder file needs to be scanned & repaired using inbox repair tool. There are certain steps that you need to follow as instructed. Besides, this it is always viable to backup your PST file before making use of the tool, so that you don’t have to suffer from irreparable damage to PST.

If, PST repair process could not be completed successfully with scanpst.exe you could try other equipped tools such as the PST repair software that will do exhaustive scanning of the folder contents & retrieve the same in accessible form. All your emails, notes, contacts and calendars could be recovered in easy to follow & efficient manner.

When you try to open the Pst file you may get this error message: “<FileName>.pst file could not be opened. The file may not be compatible with this version of Outlook or it may be corrupted.”

This message shows the PST corruption. To recover data you require performing PST recovery. You may get this message when the file is corrupted and Microsoft outlook is not recognizing it. The file is saved in the encrypted folder.

To solve this problem you can use inbox repair tool or scanpst.exe to repair the damaged PST file. First exit MS Outlook and press Start. Then select the Control Panel. Then press User Accounts and then click Mail. Then press Data Files, choose Personal Folders and then click Settings. You can note the name in the Filename box. Then press OK and then click the Close button 2 times. Then Click the Start button, and type %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office\Office12\ in Start Search box and finally press Enter key. Then double-click the Scanpst.exe. Then write file name and the path in the Enter the name of the file you want to scan box. Then click the Start and when the Scanpst.exe finishes, then click the OK button.

In many cases this method works but it has also some limitations. In case of the large PST file it can’t scan and can’t repair. In that case you can use third party applications which can easily repair the large PST files.

Sometime all the problems of corrupted files cannot be repaired, some may remain unfixed. So for this you may need to restore the entire corrupted or damaged files either by doing a backup or repairing the files with the use of third party repair applications. This Inbox Repair Tool is well capable for fixing the problems of files. But there can arise a situation when you find that in MS Outlook 2007 your pst files has got corrupt. On making a repair of files, it fails and instead of recovering, this gives an error message:
“Scanpst.exe fails with Fatal Error: 80040818”

The cause for this error message can be the PST Files which has been brought from an earlier version Outlook to Outlook 2007. As such Outlook 2002 has ANSI formatted PST files with a limited size of 2GB. So the errors get occur because of the large size of PST files.

For making a recovery, Repair PST Software can also be used. Its crop tool can reduce the size. The Software can well apply exclusive scanning algorithms for repairing and than it can restore a corrupt .pst file. This is fully featured repair software which repairs all damages of PST Files. This is easy to use software.