Question : Corrupted Outlook archive.pst file

I have an issue with trying to make a copy of Outlook's "archive.pst" file in that it keeps failing a CRC check when I attempt to copy it using Windows Explorer.

To make a long story short this is a laptop (Latitude D820) running Windows XP Professional SP3 and using Outlook 2003. Outlook 2003 is set up with one POP3 email account and over the weekend my boss dropped the laptop from about two and a half feet up onto a hardwood floor while the laptop was running and while Outlook was open on the computer. From discussion with him the system continued to run but gave him a "really really bad error" (his description) and told him to restart the computer. Since restarting the computer everything is incredibly slow. After getting it this morning and looking at it the Event Viewer is reporting numerous bad blocks on the hard drive and I am replacing it but right now I am trying to back up some data and of course the Outlook data files are part of that. The "outlook.pst" file is 583MB and the "archive.pst" file is 2.2GB with about 3 years of old semi-important/important emails sitting in it.

I managed to copy "Outlook.pst" and "extend.dat" but when I try to copy "archive.pst" it gets to about 95% and then gives an error that it couldn't copy the file due to it failing a CRC check. My guess is that since Outlook was open when the system hit the floor the "archive.pst" file got corrupted in the process.

I have tried copying it with Windows running in Safe Mode with so success. I have tried putting the hard drive in an external enclosure and copying it onto another laptop with no success and right now I am actually running GRC's SpinRite on the drive to see if that will possibly correct that area of the drive enough to let me copy the file; but SpinRite could possibly run for hours or days yet.

Is there another way that I should go about this or does anyone have any recommendations for trying to recover this "archive.pst" file?

Answer : Corrupted Outlook archive.pst file

Your file is corrupt.

Norton Disk Doctor used to do a pretty good job at fixing these types of errors.

This is not an internal corruption within the PST file itself moreover, it's a currupt DOS file system. Normally, SCANDISK or CHKDSK would remedy this however, I'm always reticent about running high-level repair tools which may have a tendency to truncate a corrupt file without attempting to actually retrieve fragments of otherwise lost data which. Again, Norton used to include a tool called Norton Disk Editor (NDE) which I found particularly helpful on several occasions however, some level of expertise is required to make the best use of these tools.

As a suggestion to the above, it's a good idea to create a shortcut to SCANPST.EXE and run it every so often.

Another overlooked Microsoft utility free with XP is NTBACKUP. You can set this up to do a weekly (or even daily) scheduled backup to avoid the same problems in the future.