Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Corrupt PST handling (particularly > 2GB files on the old PST format)

I had a case where I exported an old mailbox from Exchange 2003 and could not access the file I exported. The mailbox was larger than 2 GB, but Exchange 2003 could only export 2 GB. When I tried to open the PST file in Outlook, I got "the [PST file] has reached its maximum size." and I wasn't able to open the PST.

Ugh.

I used the PST crop tool and tried to use scanPST - to no avail. The crop tool worked, but scanPST would fail and say it didn't make any changes to my cropped PST file. I tried cropping various amounts and running scanpst. I used a hex editor and altered some parts of the PST as I read other places. No success.

Reading through someone else's thoughts, I was able to use exmerge to import the PST back to an Exchange mailbox. I was able to do this *without* cropping the 2 GB PST.

This was very annoying, but eventually worked using exmerge. If that failed, I would have had to use one of the many paid PST recovery options. The fact that Exchange will export a corrupt PST is absurd. Why would there not be an error if it couldn't complete the export?

1 comment:

Unknown said...

There is a possibility that PST file not accessible due large size of PST file. I would recommend that Compact PST is the best option rather than crop tool because it is not easy to manage small PST files after crop or split the PST file. To get the best result you can try to compress the PST file so that you can easily import and export data.