In order to repair corrupt or damaged PST file of MS Outlook application Microsoft has provided an inbuilt utility called Inbox Repair tool. This tool gets installed with the package automatically and resides in MS Office folder of system drive in different locations as per the version of Office. Like for Outlook 2007 this utility resides in – C:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice12. But this utility has limited functionalities and thus fails to perform when the corruption of the PST file is high. In such situation, to to resolve the issue and to make the PST file accessible, using third party PST file repair is the only option left.

Inbox Repair Tool is associated with a program file called 'Scanpst.exe'. So, to run the utility, you need to locate this file first. But at time when you try to run this inbuilt utility you can encounter error message as -

“An unexpected error prevented access to this file. Use ScanDisk to check the disk for errors, and then try using the Inbox Repair tool again.”

As you can see the error suggests that, Scanpst could not be accessed.

Reason

Scanpst.exe might fail to be accessed either because of disk error or because of related problems. Possibly PST file is severely corrupted which is beyond the repairing capabilities of Scanpst tool.

Solution

In order to resolve this problem, just apply the solutions mentioned below -

• First run 'chkdsk' to determine and correct the disk related problems and then try to run the tool again.
• If this doesn't help, then try to recover the PST data as follows -
  • If you are able to open the PST file, then try to create a new data file with Outlook and import all your data to it.
  • If the PST file is not opening, then use the available backup for restoration or use third party PST repair utility.

Third party tools can be every effective in this situations as they are empowered by a suitable scanning algorithms that can repair a damaged or corrupt Outlook Inbox easily and efficiently. These is simply a commercial Inbox Repair tool which is more powerful and efficient than the inbuilt one.