Corrupt Outlook

Raekwon

I have a clients PC (2GHz Pentium 4, 512RAM & 40GB HDD) that seems very unstable due to Outlook. The HDD was 100% full when I got it but after removing some unwanted programs and large folders I have got it back to 34% free space.

The problem is whenever Outlook gets launched it says that the Personal Folder was not closed properly and the it needs to repair it. This can take anything from 45 minutes to 2 hours. I backed up the .pst file (which is nearly 14GB) but I was told not to delete any of the emails because the client insists that they need all of the emails on there.

Is there anyway I can repair this issue???

Btw the machine is running XP SP3 with Office Professional 2003 SP3.

Taltos

Not an expert on this - but I believe that Outlook has problems with PST files get too large - and this is HUGE.

Would recommend you advise your client to begin archiving the mails immediately. Maybe even across a few archives.
What I think you might be looking at here will be an eventual critical failure where you will not be able to get any of the mails.

In one of my prev jobs our IT crew there used to tell us that if that happened we could kiss the files goodbye - but I think MS have brought out a recovery for this so that the mails can be recovered.

But still think that 14G is way way too large...
So - Archive and implement an archival procedure etc for them.

Raekwon

Thanks for the reply

Yeah I agree 14GB is far to big especially since the HDD is only 40GB. I was just wondering do you have experience using the Microsoft .pst recovery tool? Will it actually get Outlook to open without waiting a few hours for it too repair it over and over again?

Capt'n Midnight

14 GB sounds like someone did a regedit to increase the max size ?


Get them to split it by date , archive off each year to get several smaller PST's

larger PST's are more likely to get corrupted and take longer to fix, if outlook gets snotty on startup then you can expect to wait for an hour while it checks the PST and you CAN'T turn off the PC during this time, it's a denial of service attack waiting to happen.


14GB means you need at least 14GB for a backup to even attempt a recovery and a little bit more.

scanpst is the tool

ob

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

14 GB sounds like someone did a regedit to increase the max size ?

In 2003/2007, the default max is 20GB.

kmick

I have seen a lot of problems with files over 2Gb. Just archive it into 10 files roughly by date and put it on a small external hard drive (or better still a backed up hard drive). Keep the last 3 -6 months on the original machine and delete the rest. Then convince them to buy a new DELL tower. They cost sweet FA.

Capt'n Midnight

ob wrote: »

In 2003/2007, the default max is 20GB.

Fair enough , could have sworn it was about 8GB

uch

PST limitation is 2GB up to Outlook 2002 ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088/en-us ) so a pst of the size you have is sure to cause you a problem

Raekwon

Okay I backed up all of the data onto an external HDD (including the 14GB .pst file) and reinstalled XP SP3 from scratch. I did this mainly because of how unstable the OS had become, basically because of Outlook. It refused to launch Firefox, timed programmes out randomly and gave blue screens with virtual memory errors so a reinstall was the only option IMO.

Anyway, I transfered all of the data back onto the PC after the install and the I ran the scanpst tool to repair the giant .pst file. It was going fine until it got to stage 7 of the 8 stage process and didn't seem to do anything for around 30 minutes. I hadn't got time to stick around in work to see if it progressed but hopefully it did because the client will be around tomorrow and atleast want to be able to open Outlook to be able to archive some emails at the bare minimum.