Having problems with Outlook and the pst file, it wont let me copy or back it up. The hard disk seems to just go in a rhythmic cycle of reading and nothing happens - often resulting in a 'cannot read from source disk' error.

This sounded to me like a hard disk problem so I ran a scandisk and nothing showed up - all other aspects of the machine operate fine.

I've also tried using scanpst to run a check but that too throws up read errors.

It wont let me export the thing either, complaining about disk write permissions.

Today I tried to delete a bunch of stuff to make the pst file smaller (it is about 900 MB) but it wont empty the deleted items folder and gives me the cyclic redundancy error.

I can still use the program to send/receive email.

Any suggestions as to how to salvage this file and my emails would be gratefully received!