The technical term is corrupt PST. Corrupt PSTs are actually not extremely rare. They are fairly common. It's actually so common that Microsoft put a tool in every Windows computer to fix them.
In terms of what you say, it is absolutely correct. When you get a new computer, it is imaged, but in transferring, it's no different from if you were to get a home computer. You would want to transfer files from your old one to your new one.
In that transfer, that is where the corruption occurred. It was fairly standard. You transferred files over and there was a corruption. That's what occurred.