In Microsoft Outlook, a Personal Storage Table or PST file is an open proprietary file format used to store copies of messages, calendar events, and other items within Microsoft software such as Microsoft Exchange Client, Windows Messaging and Microsoft Outlook. But sometimes, it may happen that your Outlook does not function properly or may display some error messages. This article talks about following an appropriate approach to restore PST file. In fact, the article deals with various problems of Outlook by providing easy solution of restoring Outlook or the PST files.

When the Outlook corrupts it addresses some symptoms which indicate the users to restore the PST files. Following conditions may appear when an Outlook gets corrupted

• The Outlook may take several minutes to start or it may freeze while starting
• Outlook toolbars and menu options vanish from the Outlook views
• The users receive startup error messages such as Out of Memory errors or Microsoft error reports.

It is commonly known that, most of the Outlook programs integrate their own toolbars and menus within the Outlook main user interface. To store the data and information for those files, Outlook uses a single configuration file which is termed as OUTCMD.DAT. This file stores the data about the toolbars and menus and reflects the changes the user made on the Outlook default toolbars and menus. The OUTCMD.DAT file can easily get corrupted or damaged resulting in the data loss of the PST files. Some hard disk problems, Outlook malfunctions or install/uninstall procedures initiated by third party add-ins may affect the functioning of OUTCMD.DAT file which makes the file corrupted. When this kind of scenario occurs, the Outlook needs to be restored which further restores Outlook views, toolbars, menu or settings. The content of the OUTCMD.DAT file is reset to restore the Outlook or PST files.
How to restore Outlook:
The steps to restore the OUTCMD.DAT file of Outlook are as follows:

• Exit Outlook
• Locate the OUTCMD.DAT file
• If you are running Windows XP and you installed Outlook on its default path, you can find the file in “C:\Documents and Settings\-USER-\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook”, where “-USER-” if the name of your Windows login account. If not, search your local disk for the filename
• Rename the OUTCMD.DAT file to a different filename
• Restart Outlook

When the Outlook is restarted, it restores the default OUTCMD.DAT file from scratch and the users become capable of using the Outlook with its default view settings.

Apart from the above discussions, it is also recommended that to restore Outlook one needs to repair the PST files. As corrupt PST files create various problems running the Outlook so they should be repaired once they corrupt. Various reasons like virus attack, errors while folder compaction, antivirus scanning and application faults may result in corrupting the PST files. When these files are repaired, new PST files are generated which the users can use separately in Outlook.

There are various such tools which repair the PST file and restore the Outlook. The advance tool is one that supports batch processing of PST file in one go or recovers emails from multiple PST files at a time. Read more http://www.recoveryfiles.org/outlook-pst-recovery.html