The Microsoft outlook PST files can be easily copied or moved to an external storage media like CD, DVD for restoration. While doing so it is recommended to keep outlook closed or otherwise the PST file might be corrupt.

There is a tool named as Scanpst.exe or Scanpst which is supplied with the Microsoft Outlook and is used to repair damaged PST files. This tool is useful when the damage is not on so large scale and also the file size is below 2GB. But in reality many situations occur where the tool fails to repair the corrupted files which need to be imported and accessed in MS Outlook.

In the real life situation outlook users copies outlook PST to a CD and later reinstall over the new disk. After installing MS Outlook on new disk, he/she replaces the newly created outlook PST with the one copied to the CD. But when he or she tries to access the PST through MS Outlook, the application does not recognize the file. If you try to import the same PST post re-installing, MS outlook gives and error message that says the file is not a valid personal folder. You may get an error message like

“The Inbox Repair Tool does not recognize the file file_path.pst. No information can be recovered”

The mistake done over here are that the user has overwritten the PST which should never be overwritten as the user did in this case. One more thing is that one need to remove the read only attribute before trying to access or import it.

Solution