An Outlook Personal Folder might get damaged due to several reasons including unexpected shutdown, virus infection, operating system problems and storing the file on network. Such events cause file inaccessible. Microsoft provides the Inbox Repair Tool, also called Scanpst.exe, to fix most of such file corruption problems. The tool allows you to recover messages, folders and other items from a damaged .pst file in most of the cases. But Inbox Repair Tool has some limitations and hence can repair the corrupted .pst file in restricted number of cases. So, if the tool fails to repair file corruption, you need to use third-party applications to perform the task.

Inbox Repair Tool Repair Process

Outlook personal folder is stored as a database file with structures such as reference counts and BTrees. Scanpst examines the file on the basis of these internal data structures and performs a low-level scan of the file. The tool validates the file by verifying specific blocks of tables or structures. If any of these blocks is found to be corrupted or unreadable, Inbox Repair Tool deletes it. As a result, the tool also removes the item while validation that is associated with the corrupt block. When an item is removed, the log file of Scan PST records the corresponding entries. The changes performed by the tool are visible at higher-level, which involves messages and folders:

Inbox Repair Tool deals with messages as:

1-By validating attachment and recipient tables
2-After the above steps are successfully accomplished, Inbox Repair Tool performs some basic steps required to synchronize recipient properties on the message and contents of recipient table. It also performs steps for validating parent folder of the message and checks the message for some valid set of properties, such as PR_CREATION_TIME, PR_MESSAGE_FLAGS etc.
3-By modifying recipient display properties in order to make them consistent according to recipient table recovered.
4-After the above operation succeeds, Inbox Repair Tool then puts the orphaned messages in a single Orphans folder.

Inbox Repair Tool deals with folders as:

5-Verifies if correct tables are associated with the correct folder
6-Scans the .pst file database row-wise for each table while making sure that subfolder or message exists, as expected
7-If no subfolder or message is found, it removes the corresponding row
8-If it finds the subfolder or message, it further validates it
9-However, if it successfully performs the validation, the tool analyzes the now-recovered message values to make them consistent with table values. If the entire structure of the folders is corrupt, they are recreated with no data

Functions of Inbox Repair Tool:

1-Analyzes .pst file directory structure
2-Analyzes item headers
3-Can convert any of the files into .pst file
4-Takes .pst file backup before trying to repair it
5-Repairs Personal Folders file by finding and correcting possible problems

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