Recovering corrupted PST file due to CRC errors in Outlook 2003

MS Outlook is an email application from Microsoft that is used extensively all over the world. It can either be procured as a standalone application or with the MS Office product suite. It is used for emailing, managing contacts and fixing meetings with them, creating tasks and journals, and what not. All such information is stored in a Personal Table Storage (PST) file. Sometimes, this PST file may get corrupt due to various reasons such as CRC errors, virus infections, exiting Outlook abruptly, human errors, power outages, etc. In such cases, you should use appropriate measures to rectify the issue. However, if you are unable to do so then you should use a third-party PST recovery software to do the needful.

Consider a scenario wherein you use Outlook 2003 in your organization. For some reasons, you have to shift your workstation. You take all your Outlook data in a PST file and get shifted. Once you are shifted, you import the PST file in Outlook and start to download the emails. However, you are unable to do so. An error message is displayed, that is:

"File path\filename.pst could not be accessed. Data error. Cyclic redundancy check."

Here, File path\filename refers to the location and name, respectively, of the PST file.

Cause:
The root cause of this error message is that the PST file has corrupted because of the CRC error. It may have appeared due to media issues in the storage media that you used to move the PST file to the new system.

Resolution:
To resolve this error message, you should perform the following methods, preferably in the given order:
1)Scan the hard disk for errors using Chkdsk.
2)Recreate your PST file and use Inbox Repair (Scanpst.exe) tool to rebuild the file header.

The aforementioned methods should be able to resolve the issue. However, if the problem is still there then you should use a third-party PST file recovery software to address the situation. Such read-only tools are able to recover PST files without overwriting the original contents.

Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair is a PST recovery software that enables you to recover PST files from any instance of corruption. It is supported by MS Outlook 2010 (Beta), 2007, 2003, 2002, and 2000. This PST recovery tool is able to recover various Outlook objects such as emails, contacts, calendar entries, journals, tasks, meeting reminders, etc. In addition, this PST file recovery tool is able to preserve the formatting of the RTF and HTML messages. It is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, and Server 2000.