Craig Mayhew’s Blog

If you get a corrupt mailbox with Microsoft Outlook, when you open outlook it will kindly tell you which mailbox is corrupted and tell you to use Scanpst.exe to fix it. Unfortunately it doesn’t tell you where Scanpst.exe is!

Windows 2000:
In Windows 2000, you can locate Scanpst.exe on the CD:
<CD drive>:\Program Files\Common Files\System\Mapi\1033\NT\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Scanpst.exe

Windows XP
If you have Microsoft Office installed:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
If you don’t have Microsoft Office installed, try here:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1033\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively:
C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Scanpst.exe

Windows Vista
C;:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively, if you have Microsoft Office:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\Scanpst.exe
Alternatively:
C:\Programme\Common Files\System\MSMAPI\1031\Scanpst.exe

Internet Download
If you still can’t find the Inbox Repair Tool, you can download it from here (http://www.emailaddressmanager.com/outlook/Scanpst.exe) then copy it to one of the above folders so it can easily be found again.

I came across the missing NTLDR error when I was rebuilding a machine to run folding@home. It needed the power supply replacing as it had recently failed (gone bang!). At the same time it damagaed some of the filesystem on the hard disk.

To fix the error:

1. Insert the Windows XP bootable CD into the computer.
2. When prompted to “press any key to boot from the CD”, press any key.
3. Once in the Windows XP setup menu press the “R” key to repair Windows.
4. Log into your Windows installation by pressing the “1″ key and pressing enter.
5. You may then be prompted for your administrator password, if it asks then enter that password.
6. Copy the below two files to the root directory of the primary hard disk (usually the c:\ drive). In the below example I am copying the files from the CD-ROM drive, which in this case is “e:\”. This letter may be different on your computer.

copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\
copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\

7. Once both of these files have been successfully copied, remove the CD from the computer and reboot.

Hopefully that should solve the problem for you. Although in my case it was fairly obvious why the hard disk had been slightly corrupted, This error although fixed may be caused by any number of serious problems such as a partially corrupted hard disk, so it’s worth taking a backup of anything important and investigating further.