recovering deleted emails from pst

[Gaurav]

Hi,

The question is "Can I recover hard deleted items that exist in a pst file?"

Here's the explanation:
I posted a few days ago because I had tried to save my offline emails in a
pst file. When I formatted my harddisk and tried to open the .pst file in
outlook all my emails were gone! The odd thing being the .pst file was 43MB
large, but in outlook when I looked at it it insisted there was only 600KB of
contacts and no mail.

Now I have downloaded a piece of software that is telling me that in fact
the email is 'deleted' and the software can recover it for me, but I need to
purchase the software to recover the emails. However I don't really want to
spend $89 on it.

Any help would be useful. (Including a definitive "There is no other way to
recover the mails manually, you have to by the software")

Thanks a lot,

Gaurav

 

[Gaurav]

Hello,

No I'm not crazy and writing to myself this is for the benefit of anyone
else who reads this, and also if anyone has any further insights or
suggestions then please say so.

I managed to recover about 95% of my emails by purposefully corrupting the
..pst file.
I used a hex editor to corrupt the 'FAT' (just randomly I put spaces in the
first 10-20 characters) and then ran the scanpst inbox repair tool and hey
presto! I had most of my emails back
There are still a few missing but they are fortunately the one's with simple
text data that I can copy from a downloaded piece of recovery software
without paying for it to restore the whole pst file

If anyone has any further insights please do share them (ie. a more formal
way to recover the deleted mail)

Thanks,

Gaurav

 

[Alan]

Yes, if you don't want to pay for recovering the emails, then you can
try scanpst.exe.

Alan Chen
DataNumen, Inc. - World leader in data recovery technologies
Website: http://www.datanumen.com
Fax: +1-800-9917-FAX (US Toll-Free)

 

[Kris]

I tried your solution with the hex editor but I guess I know nothing about
how to edit the pst file in hex editor. I found the Stellar software and the
demo does recover about 5mb of the 300mb file. Can you help me with the hex
editor