.pst File not valid pst file

[Bernhard Mueller]

I am using outlook 2003 SP3 out of the Office Professional Edition 2003
German Edition.
Outlook worked fine and suddenly after starting Outlook as usual I got the
message: "The file xxx.pst ist not a personal folder file (.pst)"
it is independent if I try to open this file as the personal folder file of
a defined profile or as an aditional folder file in a working profile. This
message appears at all attempts.
Scanpst.exe reports that it is not able to see that this ist a .pst file.
Is there any way to recover the data stored in this .pst file?

Thanks for any assistance
Regards
Bernd

 

[Pat Willener]

Is this an ANSI (97-2002) type PST file, and has it grown to 2GB
recently? If so, use the "oversized PST crop tool"
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088) to get rid of the excess size,
then run scanpst to repair any errors.

If not, do you have a recent backup of your PST file that you could restore?

 

[Bernhard Mueller]

Hi Pat,
yes it should be a ANSI (97-2002) type .pst file but it is only 36 KB and I
do not have any explanation why it is that small size.

The new generated file is already 3.737 KB and again an ANSI (97-2002) file.

Does this information help??

Regards
Bernd

 

[Pat Willener]

Hi Bernd,

When you create a new PST file, it has an initial size of 265KB;
anything smaller than that is not a valid PST file.

The only option I see is to restore from a recent backup.

Regards,
Pat