Outlook (Office XP) problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kris
  • Start date Start date
K

Kris

I realize this program is not pertinent to this forum,
but I tried to post on the Office newsgroup and that
didn't work. Earlier this morning when I first booted my
PC, Scandisk ran automatically since the disk needed to
be checked for consistency. It did some cleaning; some
orphan files and such were deleted. Once I was able to
log on to my computer, I clicked on the Outlook icon from
the start menu. The following error appeared: "Unable to
start processing services. The file C:\Documents and
Settings\KRISTIAN\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\Outlook.pst is not a personal folder file"
and the program didn't run. However, if I clicked on the
desktop icon the program would execute, but the same
error message would appear. If I attempted to open my
Hotmail folder another message appeared stating: "Unable
to start processing services. The file C:\Documents and
Settings\KRISTIAN\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Hotmail-00000005.pst is not a
personal folders file". My first course of action was to
run the Detect and Repair tool from within Outlook, but
that didn't work. Can anyone help? I hope I don't have
to lose all my saved email.
 
Kris said:
I realize this program is not pertinent to this forum,
but I tried to post on the Office newsgroup and that
didn't work. Earlier this morning when I first booted my
PC, Scandisk ran automatically since the disk needed to
be checked for consistency. It did some cleaning; some
orphan files and such were deleted. Once I was able to
log on to my computer, I clicked on the Outlook icon from
the start menu. The following error appeared: "Unable to
start processing services. The file C:\Documents and
Settings\KRISTIAN\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\Outlook.pst is not a personal folder file"
and the program didn't run. However, if I clicked on the
desktop icon the program would execute, but the same
error message would appear. If I attempted to open my
Hotmail folder another message appeared stating: "Unable
to start processing services. The file C:\Documents and
Settings\KRISTIAN\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Hotmail-00000005.pst is not a
personal folders file". My first course of action was to
run the Detect and Repair tool from within Outlook, but
that didn't work. Can anyone help? I hope I don't have
to lose all my saved email.
Click to expand...

Was that detect and repair from the Help menu? If you'd clicked on
"Microsoft Outlook Help" instaed and entered ".pst repair" into the search
box, then you would have got this answer:

"If you can't open your Personal Folders file (.pst) or Offline Folder file
(.ost) file, or you suspect that your .pst or .ost data file is corrupt, you
can use Scanpst.exe, the Inbox repair tool, to diagnose and repair errors in
the file. Scanpst.exe scans only the .pst or.ost file, making sure that the
file structure is intact. It doesn't scan your mailbox on the Microsoft
Exchange server.
Scanpst.exe is installed when you install Microsoft Outlook and is located
at:

drive:\Program Files\Common Files\System\Mapi\1033\

For detailed information about running the tool, see the Help file,
Scanpst.hlp, at the same location."
 
Thanks for the help. I went where you pointed out and
ran scanpst. I attempted to repair the file C:\Documents
and Settings\KRISTIAN\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.pst, but it returned an
error stating it was not able to repair the file because
it was too small to contain any useful data. So, what do
I do next? Is there a backup of the information contained
in this file on my computer? There's a file called
Outlook.Back on the same directory where the .pst files
reside.
 
Kris said:
Thanks for the help. I went where you pointed out and
ran scanpst. I attempted to repair the file C:\Documents
and Settings\KRISTIAN\Local Settings\Application
Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.pst, but it returned an
error stating it was not able to repair the file because
it was too small to contain any useful data. So, what do
I do next? Is there a backup of the information contained
in this file on my computer? There's a file called
Outlook.Back on the same directory where the .pst files
reside.
Click to expand...

Hum, how big is it then?
You could try opening the backup file to see what's in there. From the menu;
File>Backup>open backup. You will then get a window to select the backup
file from.
 
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