Microsoft Outlook uses PST files to store the important documents like mails, messages, contacts, notes, journals offline. But when they get corrupted because of reasons like virus attack, improper closing of MS Outlook, oversized PST file, the chances of data loss increases. You are unable to access the files and due to which your work gets hampered to a great extent.

Scanpst.exe, an Inbox Repair Tool provided by Outlook to repair corrupted PST files. It is automatically installed at the time of installation of Windows. It is used to recover the files and folders stored in corrupted .pst or .ost file. The location of scanpst.exe is different in every versions of Outlook. You need to locate it yourself to avail the features of this tool.

 As this file is hidden, so to make it visible you need to enable the option of Show Hidden files. Then, this tool appears at its default location C:\users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook. Even after enabling the option you do not find this tool, and then search for it still you don’t get the scanpst.exe icon on the screen then scanpst.exe download is available. Download Scanpst.exe and repair corrupted PST file.  

As this repair utility is freely provided by the Outlook, but you can face few problems while using it. It is designed to repair damaged Outlook PST files but includes certain limitations. This tool analyses the corrupt PST files, scans them and ultimately repairs them only if the corruption exists in the PST file headers. In most of the cases, you will meet up with errors including “Scanpst.exe does not work”, Scanpst.exe not responding”, Scanpst.exe not found”, “Outlook is attempting to repair your mailbox folders” and many others. While the repairing process, this tool can also lose your data with the continued corruption problem in it.

In short, it can be said that:

• Scanpst.exe cannot repair PST files of size beyond 2 GB.
• Repairing corrupted oversized PST files may lead to deletion of the data for reduction in size
• It repairs PST files only if the corruption exists in file header
• Users face difficulties in finding the location of this Inbox repair tool as it hidden
• The issue of corruption remains in the data as the repair process is not completed most of the times.

Thus, because of these limitations of scanpst.exe cannot be served as an effective solution for repairing PST files. At that time you can look for the another solution to repair corrupted PST file.