Dealing With The ‘Unable To Access MS Outlook’ Error

Microsoft Outlook is one of the best communication programs developed by the software giant, which enables users to avail wonderful functionalities like schedulers, calendars, journals and many other features that makes it an excellent personal information manager and prove to be viable for business communication. The popular email client accumulates all the information related to emails, contacts and other personal data. So, any damage that occurs to PST files would severely restrict the user’s access to any information in Outlook.

Here are the reasons that may have caused the corruption:

• pst files corruption when used over a network 
• Header corruption
• Corruption in PST file while compacting 
• pst file damage when the size exceeds 2 GB 
• Corruption because of defragmentation

Corruption in PST file can be very annoying mostly for those who frequently use outlook. Suppose, you have got your PST file severely damaged, Your Outlook not working as you cannot even open it. You would certainly not like to lose access to the mail client.

But, you need not worry about your Outlook not working as you can easily recover your entire data by the following methods. If you are using Windows XP operating system:

1. Before fixing a corrupt.pst file, you need to make it absolutely sure that you back up your corrupted PST, so that you will have the data intact. The PST is usually located in C:\Documents and Settings\alan.JAPAN\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.pst in Windows XP.
2. After that, you need to Run scanpst.exe to find the corrupted PST file. The Scanpst.exe can be found using XP system search. 
3. In case you have many Outlook entries and directories in the ‘Lost And Found’ directory, you may face problems in moving or copying the contacts back into Contacts and similarly, the calendar entries back to the Calendar. Outlook may respond with a message - "empty not found".
4. You need to make a new PST and then copy the data to the new fresh empty file. It is possible for you to do this by creating a new PST File > Import and Export > Export To File > Export as PST > Lost And Found > ExportFileName.PST, with the "include subfolders" option checked. Next, you need to dump the ‘Lost And Found Data’ subfolders to other PSTs. You may drag all the data to the subsequent folders.

The above instructions should be able to help you access your Outlook again.