Working Of The Inbox Repair Tool

By Author: Levi Adam
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Inbox Repair Tool also known as Scanpst.exe can be used to recover folders and items from a corrupted Personal Folders (.pst) file or offline folder (.ost) file in Microsoft Outlook 2002, Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010. This Scanpst.exe utility gets installed automatically when you install Microsoft Office or Microsoft Outlook. Scanpst.exe is not available as a download. There are a few things this repair tool does to remove irregularities.

What the Inbox Repair Tool does

Suppose you have a damaged PST file made with Outlook 2007 version. When you run the Inbox repair tool Outlook 2007 version on a Personal Folders (.pst) file, it does the following:

1. Scanpst.exe analyses the Personal Folders (.pst) file directory structure and item headers to attempt recovery all folders and items.
2. If the Inbox Repair Tool recovers the Personal Folders (.pst) file, it means that the tool found problems, and repaired all what it possibly could.
3. Inbox Repair tries to change any incorrect PST file format into mountable Personal Folders (.pst) ...
... file. For example, if you rename an executable file to "xxx.pst" (without quotation marks), the tool changes the file to a mountable .pst file.
4. The tool automatically creates a backup copy of any Personal Folders (.pst) file before trying to repair the file.

How the Inbox Repair Tool repair errors

ScanPST scans the internal data structures of a .pst file and corrects the file if found with errors. Any .pst file is a database file. Therefore, structures, such as BTrees and reference counts, are checked and repaired as required. These low-level objects are oblivious of the upper-level structures, such as messages, calendar items, and so on, that are built upon them.

However, there is a shortcoming with the Inbox Repair tool. If it concludes that a specific block of the structure or table is unreadable or corrupted, ScanPST removes it. If that block was part of a specific item in Outlook, the item will be removed when it is validated. This can lead to major data loss as it cannot repair everything at folder level. You simply lose the data and the action will be entered in the ScanPST log file.

It repairs mainly header errors, tables, validates structures and rows with subfolders. Major corruption cases can’t be fixed with the Inbox repair tool. If scanpst fails to provide you the required support, you can use third party recovery software for complete data recovery. They easily recover email attachments, zipped attachments, images, files, emails, folders, calendars, contacts, tasks, notes.

Kernel for PST Repair is an efficient Inbox Repair Tool which repairs data from PST files that get corrupt due to virus contamination, header structure deleted, 2GB limitation, broken files etc. It is integrated with powerful QFSCI algorithms to recover all the data, and proves better than the scanpst.exe utility. It restores formatting from RTF and HTML messages. Apart from PST format, you can even save recovered items in .EML, .DBX and .MSG format. It supports Outlook 2010, 2007, 2003, 2002(XP), 2000 and 97 version as well as MS Outlook Express v5.0, 5.01, 5.5 and 6.0. A free trial version is also available for evaluation but you can only preview the recovered items. Purchase the full version to restore all the data from any damaged PST file.