Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Recovering Access database from “Enter Password” error

Microsoft Access is a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) that integrates Microsoft Jet Database Engine with a graphical user interface and development tools. It supports a variety of standard field types, indexes, and referential integrity. It also includes a query interface, forms to display and enter data, and reports for printing. You can also import Access databases in other MS Office applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. However, sometimes the Access database, that is imported in these applications, fails to open because of various reasons. You should take appropriate measures to tackle such situations and use an Access database repair tool.

Consider a scenario wherein you have imported an Access database into an MS Excel spreadsheet on which you are working. You have inserted a hyperlink that points to the database. You click on that hyperlink but it fails to open and an error message is displayed:

“Enter password.”

This error is displayed even though you have not assigned a password for the database.

Cause:
There could be various causes for this error message. They are:

Use of hyperlink in an MS Office application to open the database.
Use of VBA automation code (if done) in MS Excel to open the database.
The database is corrupt and you need to repair Access file.

The reason for the first two causes is that you may have compacted the database either manually or by using Compact on Close utility. Because of this, you are prevented from accessing the database, and you are prompted to enter the password on every attempt of opening the access database.

Resolution:
First of all, you should open the database in MS Access to ascertain whether it is corrupt or not. If you are able to open it, then the database is not corrupt. Probably the error message is occurring because of importing the database in non-Access application.
To resolve the error, you should export each object of the database into a new database either using a hyperlink or using VBA automation code. This will help you in recovering the data that is blocked in the database.

However, if you are not able to repair the access file then you should consider using a third-party Access repair tool. These read-only tools recover the database files (both .mdb and .accdb) using sophisticated scanning algorithms, thereby ensuring that the original files are not overwritten.

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