Repair a damaged Jet 4.0 database in Access 2000

Environmental factors also leave your database file damaged. The symptoms of a corrupted database can start by showing that certain of your records are deleted, to the inability to open one of the objects in the database, to the complete inaccessibility to open the access database file. The inbuilt Compact and Repair utility in MS Access is a useful tool that you can use to recover and to optimize MS Access 2000 database files. But if database corruption persists even after running the above utility, then you will need to use a commercial Access Database Recovery application to repair your database.

Important Guidelines for Running the Compact and Repair Utility

Before you can run the inbuilt “Compact and Repair” Utility on a database, take care of the following conditions:

• You must logon with an account that has Modify Design or Administer security permissions for all tables in the database.
• Enough disk space must be there for both the original and the compacted versions of the database.

The repaired or compacted database is renamed as the original database only when the Compact and Repair utility is successful.
Other users must not have the database open.

When a database is compacted, the database must be opened exclusively by Microsoft Jet to prevent any users from accessing and from modifying the database during the process.

Run the Compact and Repair utility as follows:

1. If the database is open, close it.
2. On the Tools menu, point to Database Utilities, and then click Compact and Repair Database.
3. In the Compact Database From dialog box, click the file that you want to compact, and then click Compact.
4. In the Compact Database Into dialog box, enter a new file name, and then click Save.

If the compact and repair does not succeed, you receive a message stating so. This means the damage is so severe that the damage cannot be corrected by compact and repair utility, then you will need to opt for a third party Access Database Repair software. These Access Recovery tools scan the corrupted database objects, repair them and restore the repaired object at user specified location.