How view broken FoxproFiles?

[JustinRowe]

Need a program to view foxpro2 type files with broken MEMO feild.
I want something like Sasha Grey, all in one: i mean , that i want to view different types of Foxpro and .dbf files.

 

[JRB-Bldr]

The First Choice procedure Always is to go to your Backup files.

Another approach is to do a Google Search for: vfp corrupt fpt file
The Search results will give you a lot of things to try.

i want to view different types of Foxpro and .dbf files

I have no idea what you mean by that.
Foxpro/Visual Foxpro Data Files are DBF files.
You can't 'view' the Index files (CDX or IDX) or the FPT files.
Well I guess that you could open them up with a Hex Editor, but what you saw wouldn't make much sense to you.

What "different type" of files are you referring to?

Good Luck,
JRB-Bldr

 

[Dan Freeman]

A lot depends on how things are broken. You see, there are many weird ways.

If the memo file has gone missing, GO FIND IT! Yes, go for backups! Short of that, you can usually at least browse the DBF by copying a memo field from another table and renaming it. As long as you don't try to open the memo fields Foxpro will usually cooperate.

If it's the memo file you're trying to recover that's a different kettle of fish. (Again: BACKUPS!) There are a few recovery utilities that Google might still be able to find. They each have different strengths and weaknesses.

Good luck!

 

[GriffMG]

Whatever else you do, work on a copy now - not the only 'nearly good' version you have - some
recovery tools may ruin your files beyond reading.

How big is the file, I might try opening it in a hex editor, a copy of DBU.exe from
Clipper days or something like that

Regards

Griff
Keep [Smile]ing

There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.

I'm trying to cut down on the use of shrieks (exclamation marks), I'm told they are !good for you. ​

 

[Mike Lewis]

As the others have said, it's not at all clear exactly how the file is "broken". You talk about a broken memo field. But I suspect that it is the actual memo file (the FPT file) that is in some way corrupted.

If that's so, opening the FPT in a hex editor should let you see the text of the memos - but interspersed with a bit of binary data. If the file is small, you could then manually copy and paste the individual bits of text into a new document, and use that as a first step to reconstructing the original data. But it will be a laborious process, especially as you won't have any obvious way of knowing which chunk of text relates to which record in the DBF.

Alternatively, you could write a program that automatically extracts the text from the FPT and inserts it into the correct records in the DBF. To do that, you would have to understand the structure of the FPT. The Help topic "Memo File Structure (.FPT)" could get you started on that.

Mike



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Mike Lewis (Edinburgh, Scotland)

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