Causes for PST corruption

If your Outlook begins to run very slowly or it takes as long as several minutes to open or preview the contents of a message or if your outlook is not opening up at all then you should suspect that your .pst files have got corrupted. Common reasons for PST corruption are reaching of 2GB storage limitation, headers getting corrupt, exchange server corruptions, virus attacks, software malfunction, system hangs and unexpected system shutdown. However, if you upgrade from an older version you need to create a new PST, the older PST format is not automatically converted or upgraded. If the old PST won’t open in Outlook you will need to repair it to recover your important data.

Common error messages

If you experience any of the above mentioned causes, outlook will report an error message and refuse to open the PST file. These error messages displayed helps to analyze the cause for PST corruption. Knowing the reason is as important as resolving the corruption issue. Some of the common error messages are: “Outlook.pst can not be accessed – 0×80040116″, “An unknown error has occurred. 0×80040119″, Outlook.pst has reached its maximum size, [FileName].pst file could not be opened. The file may not be compatible with this version of Outlook or it may be corrupted, File path\filename.pst could not be accessed. Data error. Cyclic redundancy check, Outlook.pst could not be found and many more.

Solution

To fix the problem you can either use a free utility that Microsoft provides or grab hold of a third party program. Outlook inbox repair tool is useful in some cases but cannot handle severe PST corruption. If you fail to perform PST repair with this tool, then the next option is advanced Outlook mail recovery software.