How To: Fix Outlook Data Corruption

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So I had a weird morning today.  My computer woke up from sleep a little grumpy, definitely not the typical experience which is usually smooth as a baby’s bottom.   Anyway, I fire up outlook and I’m greeted with an error that says Outlook can’t launch because the OST file is corrupted.  I sigh in annoyance because the last thing anyone wants to do is create a new OST file and transfer an entire exchange account back on to a new Outlook profile.  I quickly Googled Lived the problem and started a trouble shooting process.

Amazingly, rather than being greeted by an authoritative link to a Microsoft knowledge base like Office Online, TechNet, or MSDN, I was greeted things I’d like to classify as “crapware”.

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Which search engine is which?

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Both Google and Live were filled with a load of junk utilities.  The reality is in most cases you don’t need to download anything.  Just run one of two commands:

SCANPST.exe

SCANOST.exe

Look in your “PROGRAM FILES –> MICROSOFT OFFICE –> OFFICE 12” folder

The latter is more user friendly because it has a GUI but SCANPST is useful if you are scanning unmounted PST files.

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There you go, run SCANOST.exe your email corruption should be gone and the log file will be generated inside your “deleted items” folder in Outlook.

 

*UPDATE*

Some of you maybe wondering how in the year 2008, Outlook corruption can still be an issue.  Well, I have a theory, with Vista's sleep and hibernate experience being a huge leap ahead of XP, more and more people are choosing not to shutdown their machines.  A combination of software design choices and poor OEM hardware lacking in shock protection can lead to corruption while the machine is proverbially manhandled into the a book bag.  I have a feeling that I corrupted Outlook because I didn't wait for my machine to sleep before tossing it into my backpack.  Oddly, I postulate that if Outlook implemented its storage more like Entourage 2008, part of Office 2008 for Mac, there would be less of an issue because the file system could self-heal corruption or at least prevent a complete lock out from the application since all items wouldn't be locked away in a database.  Bottom line make sure you buy laptops that have software/hardware driven shock protection like those found in Apple or most IBM machines.

https://blogs.technet.com/extreme/archive/2008/02/19/windows-server-2008-self-healing-ntfs.aspx