Hi : -
One of my colleague complaint in the morning about the slow performance of her laptop and she also noticed that whenever she open email client (Microsoft Outlook2003) she faces this issue. In the noon when she open her outlook one of the old pst file that was attached in outlook was not opening and giving an error message “unable to open the file, the file may be corrupted ……” so I went to inquire and straight away I de-attached that file and run the utility scanpst to repair that file.

During that repair phase the utility gave an error message “unable to repair pst file CRC error, please run the chkdsk to repair” and my colleague said that she get this message 2 days ago and upon restarting the system everything back to normal so she did lodge the complaint. Anyways I run chkdsk /f restarted the machine, the file got repaired or atleast system tried it. After restarting I try to run scanpst but again it failed. Now the user said just add it in outlook again and I will copy few important emails and we will not be using this file any more. Now here’s the surprising thing came when I try to connect that pst I am getting a password on it which is of 6 characters and neither the user nor I have set any password on it. She try to use all of her password but failed, so I try to crack the password couldn’t find a free tool to do so although I had one that is shareware and gives half the characters and as per the 3 characters we are 100% sure the password is not set by any of us and nobody else has access to that file.

My questions are: -

 Any free tool available to crack the password?
 Is it possible that CRC error could be the cause of this password?
 Is it possible to remove the CRC error from the file?