This issue comes up from time to time:
- You configure a password on a PST.
- You save your PST to a network share.
- You lose connectivity to the PST and it gets saved in an inconsistent state and is now inaccessible.
There are a number of tools out on the internet that can supposedly be used to remove the password protection on a PST or fix it. There are also old blogs about and posts about using some utilities that Microsoft used to include in the Office distribution. In this post, we’re going to focus on a couple of free/easy tools that work with any version of Outlook:
- Freeware hex editor (I’m using HxD from https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/)
- ScanPST (included in Office media, C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\root\Officexx for Office 365 ProPlus / Microsoft 365 Apps on x64, you may need to hunt around for other versions/bitnesses)
- Close/disconnect your PST from Outlook or close Outlook. We can’t do anything if it’s in use.
- Make a backup of your PST. We’re going to be introducing corruption on purpose, so make sure you have a backup before you start editing it.
- Launch hex editor.
- Starting at address 07 and going through 13 (07, 08, 09, 0A, 0B, 0C, 0D, 0E, 0F, 10, 11, 12, 13), replace each value with 20.
- Save the updated PST.
- Locate ScanPST.exe on your system and launch it.
- Using ScanPST, browse to the updated PST and click Open.
- Click Start.
- Click Repair.
- Voila! Re-attach and reopen.