How can I verify if a PST file is in healthy condition outside of Outlook?

Question

Is there a Windows command I can run to verify the health/condition of a Outlook PST file? A third-party product is suggesting that a PST file may be corrupt but the PST file imports fine into Outlook and Outlook doesn't display any errors.

Solution

Do you have a "known-good" (ie, not corrupt) backup? If so, use something like winmd5 to compare checksums, if they match then you should be OK.

Generally, Outlook will not open a corrupt .pst file, so it could just be the app complaining. However, I have run into similar issues with large (1+ GB) .pst files in the past, best thing to do is use scanpst.exe as one user said above.

To do so, navigate to:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OfficeXX\scanpst.exe

or on 64-bit:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\OfficeXX\scanpst.exe

Launch that then point it at the .pst file in question, let it do it's thing, then check through the log to see what's up. If their are issues, the program will try and correct them, and tell you whether it was successful or not in the log.

Comments

[Karan]

scanpst.exe is installed along with Outlook, Google it to see how it works. Have you considered that the 3rd party program might be the one to blame, since apparently Outlook itself has no issues with the PST?