Cannot open PST file - used scanpst, but still doesn't work

[Guest]

Hi,

I have a PST file on a CD, which is ~500 MB and I copied that file to my
local machine and made sure that the file is not read-only. I now open this
file using scanpst.exe and I get the following message - "The Inbox Repair
tool does not recognize the file. No information can be recovered."

Is there any way other than the scanpst tool to recover PST files? I am not
sure if anyone has faced this issue before, but any help on this is greatly
appreciated.

 

[Vince Averello [MVP-Outlook]]

Did the program that wrote the file to CD compress it or modify it in
anyway?

 

[Guest]

Hi,

I am sure that there was no compression / modification. The reason I was so
confident is I had 4 PST files in that machine and i worte all these three
files into three different CDs on the same day, with same program. I have two
of the four files working without any issue, but I have problems with the
other two. The two files there were working are older PST files, which could
have been created using older versions of outlook (Office XP). The two files
that are not working are probably the ones that are created with Outlook 2003.

In my new machine I am using Outlook 2003 and am able to open the two older
PST files, but not the latest ones. I was also suspecing that the writing
these files to a CD, did something wrong, but i was not sure how to explain
the reason as to why the other files were working.

Thanks again.

 

[Brian Tillman]

I am sure that there was no compression / modification. The reason I
was so confident is I had 4 PST files in that machine and i worte all
these three files into three different CDs on the same day, with same
program. I have two of the four files working without any issue, but
I have problems with the other two. The two files there were working
are older PST files, which could have been created using older
versions of outlook (Office XP). The two files that are not working
are probably the ones that are created with Outlook 2003.

Were the PSTs that don't work copied while Outlook was open? If not, it is
stories such as this that cement my opinion that some CD burning software
cannot properly copy PSTs.

 

[Guest]

Hi,

The files were copied when outlook is closed. Based on the things that I did
till now I am now giving up hopes that I can recover data from these files.
Thank you all!

 

[Guest]

I am not sure if this helps someone, but I am sure that my CD doesn't contain
a valid PST file. As Brian pointed out, this may be because of the CD burning
software... in this case Nero... but I dont want to completely blame on that
as it is the same software which wrote my other two files to the CD, which
are absolutely working fine.

The bottom line is that, If you have a PST file copied on a CD, make sure
that it works, before you store it / take it to some other computer.

If you are wondering how I was so confident that my CD doesn't contain a
valid file, it is because I used a Hex Editor today to analyse the contents
of the file. The contents of the file were 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00, and this is for all of the 500+ MB PST file I was talking about. I was
curious enough to open a working PST file, using a Hex editor and I noticed
that the contents contain some data within the file, unlike the case above.
Hence proved...

Huh! Data lost is lost...