corrupt access 2002 database...

[thujone]

the title pretty much says it all.

this computer recently got fried somehow... fried the motherboard and hard drive with some EXTREMELY important information on it. spent about $300 just to recover the data from the drive... now the most important file on there (an access 2002 *.mdb database file) will not open. it says: "unrecognized database format" which means it's corrupted.

checked out microsoft... can't repair within access... can't open the file. tried using the JET compact recovery utility thing. nothing.

would really like to avoid spending anymore money as i've already had to spend a TON of cash on this massive hardware malfunction (had to buy a new mobo, ram, hard drive x2 (raid), and data recovery services)... but... if it comes down to it we can spend the cash if we have to.

just thought i'd see if anyone here had any ideas first.

 

[boomerang]

You might want to post this at the tek-tips forums. Or, at the utteraccess forums.

Some very knowledgeable people there.

Please don't think I'm kicking you when you're down, but I hope a backup plan is in the works now. If it's important it should be backed up.

 

[thujone]

yeah... i'm doing this for my boss... at his other office that i'm not even an employee of... and for free cuz i'm such a nice guy. but from now on we're running a raid mirroring array... so hopefully when they forget to back things up things like this won't happen.

 

[boomerang]

What happens when you hold down the Shift key and double click the file? Hold it down and keep it down. Will it open then? It doesn't sound like it will.

And, in this case the mirror wouldn't have helped either. The hardware failure would've more than likely hosed them both. Think tape backup, offsite backup, or even external backup.

 

[thujone]

thanks for all the help... the shift+click didn't do anything. after talking to my boss he's ok with sending off the database to an online database recovery place.

meh... i always assumed the raid mirroring would work well enough... but if not i'll just toss one of the drives in an external firewire case and use that instead.

 

[boomerang]

At the wife's office I have a RAID 1 setup. I use this in case of HD failure. It has saved us once thus far. One of the drives in the array died. The system will still function normally it just give a warning at boot-up and then continues to boot. I have one of the drives in a removable enclosure and it comes out and goes in the safe at night.

As I said, based on what happened to you, I believe there is a good possibility both drives would have been trashed.

We have a tape backup and we rotate the tapes. The tapes leave the office at night and we let that serve as an offsite backup. It backs up automatically on a schedule so there is no forgetfulness to worry about. She has very little to backup so we didn't need to spend big bucks on an expensive (fast) tape drive. It's just a small business with less than 10 employees.

Hope the data recovery works out.

 

[thujone]

cool... i need to run over storage options with the boss... i don't think we really need to have an offsite copy or anything like that... so i might just suggest a tape drive or something... which i think there might be one laying around the office somewhere anyway.

 

[TallCoolOne]

Have you tried accessing the tables in your database using another database application besides Access? I once had this same problem with an Excel spreadsheet, Excel insisted the file was corrupt yet it opened fine in OpenOffice. If you have access to a Linux machine you can try this: http://dba.openoffice.org/drivers/mdb/index.html, a driver to open Access MDB files, or try any other database program that will import an Access file.