Thursday, August 26, 2010

Troubleshooting database corruption in MS Access 2000 database

MS Access is used by millions of users over the world primarily because of its availability with the MS Office suite. Apart from this, it is also very simple to use and also not discounting the fact that it has got online support as well as forums to provide any kind of help. But still there are certain trivial issues like database corruption due to which it becomes difficult to work at. In these situations, there appears a serious need of using an MDB file repair software if the usual methods to repair MDB file do not work.

Taking an instance into consideration in which you are trying to open an Access 2000 MDB file but fail to do so. An error message is displayed in this regard, which is:

“The database 'filename.mdb' needs to be repaired or isn't a database file.
You or another user may have unexpectedly quit Microsoft Office Access while a Microsoft Office Access database was open.
Do you want Microsoft Office Access to attempt to repair the database?”
If you click on 'Yes' to repair the MDB file, then you would receive the following error message:
“Unrecognized database format 'filename.mdb'”
In the end, you click the 'OK' button to close the dialog box and the following informational message is displayed:
“The database 'filename.mdb' can't be repaired or isn't a Microsoft Office Access database file.”

Cause:
The root cause of this error is that the MDB file is damaged, which is why you are unable to access it. In this case, the MS Access Jet engine can identify the structures and definitions of the database. However, either the table data or table definitions are damaged.

Resolution:
To repair the MDB file, you should use the 'Compact and Repair' feature in MS Access. This feature is used to repair the errors in the MDB file by compacting the database. Try to access the database after using this utility. It should be open perfectly.

To overcome this tricky situation, I would recommend to use a professional MDB repair software to repair MDB file. These Access repair tools, having rich user interface, that use extremely safe but powerful scanning algorithms to repair MDB file.

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