Error opening Inbox

[marcellino.ballotta]

After having worked for more than six months and after a not correct
closure of Microsoft Outlook 2003 (running on Windows XP) , when
trying opening the Inbox folder in one of my .pst archives (1,2GB in
total; the Inbox folder is 800k approx) the following message appears:
"Can't open the .pst file; the file is being used by another
application; close the application using the file and try again". Of
course no other application is using the .pst file. Note that opening
the Outbox folder, the Calendar folder and the other folders in the
same .pst file is working.
I tried the SCANPST.EXE utility but a message saying "Error opening
the file; Run Scandisk.exe and try again" appeared; I ran
Scandisk.exe, but when I tried running SCANPST.EXE again the same
error message appeared.
Any idea?
Thank you.
Marcellino.

 

[Guest]

If that .PST file is in Outlook 97-2002 format, it could be its size that is
causing problems. The absolute upper limit on that older format is 2GB, and
users have reported problems from 1GB upwards. Try creating a new Unicode
format .PST file and moving some of your data from other folders in the old
..PST to the new one, then compacting the old .PST...see if you can open the
Inbox then. If not, try scanpst.exe again.

--
Jocelyn Fiorello
MVP - Outlook

*** Messages sent to my e-mail address will NOT be answered -- please reply
only to the newsgroup to preserve the message thread. ***

 

[marcellino.ballotta]

Thanks Jocelyn, but no improvement.
I tried moving messages from the outbox folder (the only one with
messages inside that I can access) of what I'll call
<mycorruptedfile.pdf> to a new folder in a new archive, but I'm not
allowed to do that (Error message: access denied). Note that I can
read the messages in the outbox folder, but I can't neither move nor
delete them.
BTW: it seems that the whole .pst file has problems, as I can't
neither copy it in a different directory (error message: "data error:
cyclic redundancy control"). I tried scandisk and chkdsk, but no
improvements.
Another info: when I open Outlook a box open saying: "the file
<mycorruptedfile.pdf> has not been closed correctly; verifying ...";
then the verify ends and Outlook starts correctly (but I can't open
the Inbox in <mycorruptedfile.pdf>).
Marcellino.




Jocelyn ha scritto:

 

[Guest]

You can take a look at this article and see if any of the other suggestions
help: http://www.slipstick.com/problems/scanpst.asp

--
Jocelyn Fiorello
MVP - Outlook

*** Messages sent to my e-mail address will NOT be answered -- please reply
only to the newsgroup to preserve the message thread. ***

 

[Guest]

I had the same problem. Try running the "inbox repair tool." Type into the
search box and instructions will come up. After running the tool, all is
well.

 

[marcellino.ballotta]

Finally I found the solution!
I launched "chkdsk /V /R"; it took about 3 hours, but at the end the
file could be copied and, more important, I could launch the utility
"scanpst.exe" over it; scanpst found that the file contained errors
and repaired the errors.
As a result I could open the Inbox folder again. A few E-mails cannot
now be open, but almost all the archive was saved.
Of course I made a backup copy immediately after!
Thank you very much Jocelyn and AI V for your help.
Marcellino.

Al V ha scritto:

 

[Alan]

Hi,

You can try our product Advanced Outlook Repair to repair your PST
file. It is a powerful tool to recover messages, folders and other
objects from corrupt or damaged Microsoft Outlook PST files.

Please visit http://www.datanumen.com/aor/index.htm for detailed
information about Advanced Outlook Repair.

And you can also download a free demo version at http://www.datanumen.com/aor/aor.exe

Alan Chen
DataNumen, Inc. - World leader in data recovery technologies
Website: http://www.datanumen.com
Fax: +1-800-9917-FAX (US Toll-Free)