How to troubleshoot database corruption issues of MS Access?

Published by Jacob Martin on January 21, 2014

The MS Access database files are saved as MDB/ACCDB files on the computer it is use to store users data in tables. Private Organization, individual and even the Government departments use MS Access Database for storing different information such numbers of students in the school with details, employee details, and annual crop production in a region etc. The network administration saves sensitive access database on the Access Server to prevent unauthorized access. These file gets corrupted due to certain factors such as corrupt storage media, damaged networking cable, virus codes and others.

I stuck to such a situation when I was opening my important database and it fail to open and it displayed various error messages on the desktop screen “The xxxx.MDB is not a database file“.

As computer files are immune to corruption so any computer files can get corrupted or damaged due to several reasons. The Access database can easily gets corrupted at any point of time. Some of the common reasons which causes corruption of Access Database are-

• Virus Attack: It is the most common reason corruption of database. Virus can easily harm the data stored on any drive on the system. It can delete any part of the file or overwrite the file as a result leads to inaccessibility of the data and corruption.
• Improper cancellation of Access program: If you are working with the database file and all of a sudden you close the program in an improper manner or as a result it gets terminated due to system failure then the open database becomes corrupted or lost forever.
• Abrupt system shutdown:system shutdown is the main reason of file corruption. If the database file is not properly saved before it is been terminated or shut down. Then it may damage or corrupt the data saved inside the system drives. It does not affect the hardware device but it can damage the stored contents.
• System Crash: If the computer program is not working properly or stops working. It often gets existed after encountering error due to crash or hang up of programs. This can also lead to corruption of Access files.

Some of the most common reasons for database corruption and error messages that it encounters at the time of corruption are-

• Unrecognized database format ‘path/filename.mdb’.
• Microsoft jet database engine stopped the process because you and another user are attempting to change the same data at the same time.
• Record(s) cannot be read; no read permission on ‘xxxx’.
• The database ‘filename.mdb’ needs to be repaired or isn’t a database file.
• Microsoft Access has detected corruption in this file.
• The database is in an unexpected state.

This can be the result of damage due to crash of MS Access program, to fix this you need to reinstall the MS Office suite on the hard drive. To uninstall the old copy of MS Office Suite from the system before doing this you have to uninstall MS Office Suite from Add or Remove program from the control panel. After removing the old copy of MS office reinstall it. This can fix the corruption issues with MDF/ACCDB files.It can successfully help you to recover your table, indexes, and hyperlinks from the corrupted MDF file. If it fails to extract forms, modules and stored procedures from the corrupt MS Access Database. You can easily recover all the forms, macros and modules from the Access backup file but if you don’t have backup folder that stores data of the database then you need to repair and restore the corrupted database by the use of third party software the Access Repair Tool. This repair tool efficiently repairs all the queries, table structure, table’s data, objects and primary keys. It is the best solution to fix all the errors related to access database and restore the data back.