general help with access

[seek01]

hello, i am not at all familiar with Access. any insight would be very much appreciated.

at work here we have an old PC that has been running some physical therapy software that uses access to record data. The software is non longer supported. while the user was using this software she received an "illegal operation" error and the PC shutdown. now when you attempt to open the physical therapy software, access (i think?) opens and immediately closes with no error messages.

the shortcut that is used to launch the software has this for the target: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\ART\Office\MSACCESS.EXE" /runtime /wrkgrp "C:\ODES41\Odes.mdw" "C:\ODES41\Odes2000.mde" /user odes /pwd hanoun



in playing around with this information i have noticed that if i remove the "C:\ODES41\Odes2000.mde" from the shortcut's target it will allow access to remain open, but it does not recognise my user name or password. i have also replaced the original c:\ODES41\Odes2000.mde" file with an expired backup copy and it lets me in but the data that is supposed to be there is not there i assume because the backup file i am replacing the Odes2000.mde with is old and out of date.

my main questions are:

what does a .mde file do?
does it look like the .mde file is the problem in this case?
if so, can is there a process for repairing the .mde file (i don't believe we have a backup for this file).

again, thanks for reading this. i certainly appreciate it.

 

[SiJP]

1) an .mde file is a 'compiled' version of an .mdb file (which is an access database). This means that all of the programmable objects (forms, modules etc) will have had their vba code compiled into machine readable code..

2) It may or maynot be the problem - there may be code in the database that will close down the application under certain circumstances. The error may have caused one of them circumstances to be present!

3) You can try repairing the file. This link here goes to the microsoft website where such a tool exists (Jet Compact).

You may also try the following.

Using the original target for the shortcut, hold down the shiftkey, and double click on the shortcut. Keep the shift key pressed down until the database has loaded.

You may find that the database window now appears, and you can access the tables with all your data - as a last report (if the jet compact doesn't work) you could recover all the data from your broken version, and copy it into the working backup.


HTH's

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[seek01]

thank you for your reply.

i tried using the jet compact tool.
i specified my .MDB file as the file to compact and it needed a new file to compact to, so i created a .txt file and changed the extention to .mdb and windows now sees it as a Access file. i specified this file as file to compact to, i also tried copying the original database file to a new location and renaming it so that i could specify it as the file to compact to. both scenarios got me the same result: "Error compacting database"

am i doing something completely wrong and stupid?

i also tried holding down shift while activating the shortcut and the same behavior continued: Access opens and then closes immediately.

is there any more suggestions you might have?

and as far as those database repair tools you can buy, i downloaded one and tried it out, it said it could repair the .MDB file, but i have to buy it to get it to do that. i wonder if it would say it could repair it if there was nothing wrong with the file? do you think it would be worth checking out one of these database repair utilities?

thanks so much for your help.

 

[SiJP]

Hi Seek.

Assuming that you have correctly followed the readme that accompanies the Jet Compact tool, and it is returning an error, then I'd say your database is corrupt.

As you probably know, MS Access has a variety of 'Objects' that form a database. The most common ones that we know are Tables, Queries, Forms, Modules, Macros and Reports.

As you have a backup of your database, the later five objects are not really a worry, as these items will not have changed.

So you come to the tables - in essence the 'meat' of your database; after all, this data is what the program is all about!

There is good news and (possibly) bad news.

Good News:
The data can be accessible by ODBC (a driver used in the access of data). An Application could be built using an ODBC driver to gain access to your data, thus enabling data recovery. Even one step better, companies have built these tool's already, and use them as part of their recovery service. And even better than that, why not use MS acces its self? (I'll explain that below).

(possibly) Bad News:
That said, these companies, as you have discovered, usually charge for fixing your data.


So my advice?

1) Using MS Access, open a new blank database. See if you can import the tables from the broken database into the new blank database. Then export all of them tables from the new database into your backup.

2) If you are not comfortable in using an ODBC device 9such as MS Access) to connect to your data to recover it: Go data recovery, and pay for the service. You are pretty much guaranteed a sucessfull service.


Good Luck!


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