After wrestling with a corrupted Outlook PST file most of yesterday, I finally got a working PST file. The cause of the corrupted file is that the size is over 2GB and Outlook 2000 cannot handle it. I first tried Outlook 2003 to import the corrupted file without success. I then came across this article.
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http://www.slipstick.com/problems/repair2gbpst.asp
Basically, you need the PST2GB utility from Microsoft to truncate the corrupted file and use SCANPST to repair the truncated PST file. Note that even if you are successful in doing this, you would loose some data. I used this combination several time and tried to vary the size of the truncation, but I was not successful.
My last resort is Outlook 2007. I just used the Import/Export function of Outlook 2007 and all the emails and contacts were imported correctly without any loss. It takes a bit of time to import everything from the 2GB PST file. After the import, I noticed the new file size is less than 1GB.
You can use Advanced Outlook Repair to solve the problem, by either converting it into Outlook 2003 format , or splitting it into smaller pieces.
Another way you can do that is using PST Walker tool. Just mount the .pst file and view and search it all you like. It doesn’t have a filesize limit, so you can work with .pst files of any size.
Here’s the link to it: http://www.pstwalker.com/pstwalker.html?ref=nkla