Fix PST cannot be accessed: 0X80040116 error appeared in Outlook 2002

Outlook manages the personal documents of users like mails, notes, contacts, appointments etc within PST files. It is available in various versions but 2002 and its earlier versions has the limitation to store data up to 2GB in size as it uses ANSI formatted PST files. If the file is about to exceed 1.82 GB size, it starts giving error messages and problems like error code 0X80040116 etc. So, in that situation, the need to reduce the size of large sized PST files and the best way to do that is Split PST tool.

To demonstrate this situation in practical scenario, consider a situation where you are making an attempt to open a file in Outlook 2002, but instead an error message is shown on the screen:

"Outlook.pst can not be accessed – 0x80040116" where Outlook.pst is the name of the file

Cause:

The main cause behind this error is the corruption of PST file due to exceeded limit of size i.e. 2GB. When the file grows above the desired size limit, the above error is encountered.

Solution:

To resolve the error code 0X80040116, you need to follow the steps stated below:

Outlook 2003 and later versions use Unicode format that does not have the file size limit of 2GB. So, if you have outlook 2003 or later versions installed on your system then you can convert the oversized file into new Unicode format.

You can use the 2GB truncation tool or PST Crop tool that works to reduce the size by a specific value

Apart from these solutions, the best way is to split oversized PST files with the help of Stellar Phoenix PST Splitter tool. It divides the outlook files into smaller divisions on the basis of different criteria like size, date, time, email ids etc. and lastly restores the splitted files with .pst extension. This tool performs the process efficiently and conveniently.