How to Fix Your Broken Personal Folders (PST) File in MS Outlook

If you’ve noticed your MS Outlook being excessively slow or simply just having errors, you might need to probably scan and repair your Personal Folders file for any problems. It’s kind of like a checkdisk for your email.

How to Repair Your PST File

In order to repair your PST file, you’ll need to open the Scanpst.exe utility that’s integrated by default with MS Outlook. The only problem in there is because there’s no shortcut to it so you’ll need to find it in the MS Outlook folder.

To do this, open up Windows Explorer and then browse down to the following folder for MS Outlook 2007:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12

Or one of these folders for MS Outlook 2003 and earlier:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\Mapi\1033
C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033


Once you have opened up the utility, you’ll need to find the location of your PST file by clicking the on Browse button. If you don’t know the location, I have included a set of instructions for figuring out the location further down in this article.


Hit the Start button to start the scan.


The scanning process will take awhile and you’ll get a report at the end showing you whether you have errors in the file.


Hit on the Repair button and after it’s completed you’ll finally get the “Repair complete” message.


If you want to know what was actually repaired during the process, you’ll find a text file in the same directory as your PST file named exactly the same as your PST file.


Almost all of the information in the file is a bit cryptic so I’m not sure reading it will help you all that much.


Find Your Outlook PST File Location

If you only have a single PST file created automatically by MS Outlook, there’s a standard location under your user profile directory. Open up MS Explorer window and then paste the text below into the address bar:

%appdata%\Microsoft\Outlook


You should be able to see your PST file in the list; it’s normally named Outlook.pst at least in the later versions of MS Outlook. If you’ve created a new personal folders file, of course it might be in a different location where you’ve chosen to saved it.

Find Location of Outlook PST in Non-Standard Location

Occasionally your PST file will be in a different location for a number of reasons. For example, if you created a second PST you would have saved it somewhere.

If you can open MS Outlook, just right-click on your personal folders location and then select Properties.


Under the properties screen, hit on the Advanced button.


Now you’ll be able to see the location of the file in the Filename field. As a bonus, you can also compress the folders from here (although you shouldn’t compress it until it’s repaired first)


It’s well significant to scan your PST file every so often so you don’t lose data. You definitely should be backing up your files as well.