How to open Access from the old drive?

[flannery]

I have a client that had an employee intentionally permanently delete their work off a laptop. This employee also uninstalled the programs associated with some of the data. Using data recovery software I was able to recover everything that had been deleted that had not been over-written. I was able to recover some files that had been partially overwritten and figured that more than likely this would corrupt data files so they would not open. So far I have been able to open most of the Excel files and Word documents. I have not however been able to open any of the Access Databases. I have tried opening the Databases with Access 2007 and with OpenOffice in hopes that I could access the data and possibly resave it. I still have the old drive that I can extract data from and have specifically searched the deleted data for these Access Databases and made sure that I was getting one that was 100% intact. I was still unable to open these databases to view. I receive an error message that the database is in an unrecognized format in both Microsoft Access and OpenOffice. I really need to be able to access some of this data if not all of it, any help would be appreciated.

[zmbd]

Most likely file was created in either Acc2010 or newer and the newer version's features such as the Navigation-Form and controls were used.

See if you can open the file using one of the newer versions.
If you do not have access to the newer versions then there is a barebones "run time" that can be downloaded for free from the Microsoft Servers:
Microsoft Access 2013 Runtime -- DOWNLOAD THIS ONLY FROM THE MICROSOFT SERVERS. Other files may carry little nasties in them. You may be able to open the file using the runtime; however, depending on the design, a lot of functionality will be lost. Brightside, if the file does open then you know what to do to regain Access to the files

[AntoniZalewski]

In certain cases it is not easy to "Repair" Access databases.
The MDB structure is a lot different from an Excel file or a Word document, (Where you can recover "Some" of the data.)
If one key piece of data is missing/corrupted, it can render the entire file unrecoverable.
Or, worse, recover the date incorrectly and to the point where the database does not perform correctly.
In other words, the "repaired" db file may cause more problems than it solves.

A tip-off:
If the DB file is less than 100k, then all is probably lost.
An Empty Access db will be about this size...
You may try to do the following steps:
1. Create a new blank database using Access 2007
2. Go to External Data -> Import -> Access
3. Follow the wizard and provide the location and the Access DB file
4. Import the objects from the corrupted DB into the new DB
There are programs that claim they can recover corrupt Access db files specifically <removed link to commercial software>

Just in case look this post. http://www.sqlservercentral.com/Foru...376-384-1.aspx

[zmbd]

AntoniZalewski:

Before we go recommending costly file recovery services/software, let's see of flannery can open the file using one of the runtime environments as this is more than likely the cause if the file is actually be shown as "good" by the file recovery software used. And Flannery didn't mention which version of Office/Access was on the errant employee's computer.

Also the ACC2007 Wizard will not normally import objects nor data from an ACC2010 ACCDB file that has the newer sort ordering or objects such as the Navigation-Form/Control active regardless the state of the file (corrupted or not), I know this from first hand experience.

[flannery]

Thank you guys for your feedback and help. Sorry, that long time did not respond. This is because the issue was solved and I forgot to tell.) Thank you!