Last Updated on April 20, 2017 by Dave Farquhar
My boss’ PC went wacky on Tuesday afternoon and wouldn’t let him log in, so he had no choice but to shut down the computer. The computer came back up OK, but Outlook didn’t. He got a lot of weird error messages that I didn’t see, and Outlook created a new OST file on his desktop. But Outlook refused to connect to the Exchange server, and his inbox came up empty.
Like a lot of Outlook problems, the solution was the tag-team of Scanpst and Scanost. Fortunately, you don’t have to have admin rights to run them.
Scanost is the proper tool, but since the computer couldn’t connect to Exchange, it refused to run. So I resorted to running Scanpst instead, which can run locally. You can find those tools at c:\program files\microsoft office\office12\. The path varies depending on the version of Office you’re running. Office 2003 is office11. Office 2007 is office12 and Office 2010 is office13.
When you run Scanpst, it wants to know where your data lives. Typically it will be in %appdata%\microsoft\outlook or %localappdata%\microsoft\outlook. Point it at your outlook.ost file and let it fix the errors it finds. After it finishes, Outlook should connect up to Exchange normally.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
I’ve always wondered if there’s a command line option for running scanpst.
I normally keep 3 or 4 PST files in use, and I’d love to put together a batch file to scanpst them on a regular basis.
I don’t know of a way to run it from a command line. When I try to pass any options to scanpst, including the usual /?, it just launches the GUI. That’s a shame, as it’s exactly the kind of tool that would be useful to run from the command line.
The only way I can think of to automate it would be to use something like Autoit, available at http://www.autoitscript.com.