Vmware Raw Disk And Pst Corruption

By Author: John Peter
Total Articles: 70
Comment this article

VMware workstation is a software that has the capability of installing a guest operating system on any raw disk (physical disk or partition). But you need to be extra cautious while doing this, else, this may lead to partition corruption in some cases. It is important that you do not permit the virtual machine to change any disk partition that has already been mounted under Windows by the host. In the interest of Outlook e-mails, such instances have been reported to cause corruption of Outlook PST also. Though Outlook installation includes 'Inbox Repair Tool' to deal with such problems, but not in all instances. In such situations if you also fail to restore from backup, a PST Recovery solution can help.

Following is an instance that illustrates a typical example of PST file corruption on a Windows computer:

1)Consider, you maintain a separate disk partition for storing e-mails and related data. Thus, the Outlook PST is also stored on the same partition.
2)Next, you use the VMware raw disk feature to experiment an operation like installing ...
... operating system on a Raw partition through the Virtual Machine. But the operation goes wrong and you experience the e-mail partition corrupted
3)When you try to open and access the Outlook PST file, it cannot be read. Outlook prompts an error that it cannot access the PST.

If partition is accessible, but the PST is not, you need solutions that can recover data from the corrupted PST. Following are some applicable solutions in this respect:

1)Use Outlook built-in utility called Inbox Repair Tool. To run the tool, you first need to locate Scanpst.exe file, which is a program file and is hidden. You can type the file name in Windows file search box after enabling the view of hidden files.
2)Delete the corrupted PST, provided, a good backup of e-mails is available.
3)Use a third-party Microsoft Outlook Recovery tool that can repair and restore the corrupted PST. The PST Recovery software are user-friendly applications that allow you to scan and run powerful algorithms to fix corruption in Outlook PST.

Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair is a professional utility that repairs corrupted PST and restores it as a new PST that can be directly imported within Outlook. The Microsoft Outlook Recovery tool supports MS Outlook 2007, 2003, 2002, and 2000. The software has a 3-pane display that gives the appearance of Outlook application and is easy to operate.