[RESOLVED] Outlook.pst Corruption

Brother-in-law has come upon the old 'outlook.pst' too large problem. I've tried the 'truncate' application from Microsoft but it reports that outlook.pst is corrupt and I must run chkdisk. The problem is that the disk is FAT32 (at least that's what Window Explorer says) and chkdisk reports that it can't run on RAW devices. (Attempting to use convert to make it NTFS reports that it's corrupt and refuses to run)

I've found some code that reportedly will replicate chkdisk for the disk but it refuses to 'fix' anything because the disk is in use (it's the system disk). It's a windows based application so even if I knew how to schedule a run prior to windows loading, it wouldn't run (?)

Apart from ripping the disk out of the machine and putting it into another as a 'slave' and running the replica chkdisk application, does anyone have any better ideas?

If the computer has an optical drive or if you have an external one, then you could try any of the bootable rescue CDs/DVDs (such as UBCD4Win).

Thanks Bonnie, I'll have to go and dig out an XP CD. Now, I wonder where I put it......

Finally got it sorted.

I created a Windows PE DVD and booted from that. I then ran the CheckDisk 'clone' to correct the Disk errors. Once that had completed I ran the Outlook pst 'repair' utility (scanpst) and the data was recovered. (The 'nice' thing about Windows PE is that it recognises USB pen drives so I could run the 'clone' from a pen drive rather than include it in the PE generation)