Forum Discussion
Opening a .mdb file
Hi. I havea .mdb file that I need to open. When I try to open it using MS access 2003 or 2007, I get "unrecognized database format.." error. I do not know what version was used to create that file. I...
There is a slim chance that you can extract your data by using my utility
Check here for my EE article : https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/33729/Importing-Tables-from-Older-Unsupported-Access-databases.html
Check here for my EE article : https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/33729/Importing-Tables-from-Older-Unsupported-Access-databases.html
The email link in my article worked when I just tried it.
Anyway, I tried opening your file by several methods including Access v1.0 , Access 2.0, my own recovery software & the utility in the EE article by tsgiannis.
All of those failed stating that the file was in an unrecognised format
Next I tried opening in a text editor and could read a lot of data from the file
However doing that also confirmed it isn't an Access MDB file
This is the start of the file in Notepad
Suggest you do the same using Notepad or a hex editor to recover whatever data is useful to you
- I tried it before, but as you can see, the data are not organized at all. Can not ACCESS files be opened in a text editor like that?
- You have the closest thing to an answer here. This is not a standard mdb file. We don't know what it is exactly. If you can retrieve the data, following Colin's suggestion of saving a copy as a .txt file, that's the closest you are probably going to get.
Please don't pursue this in both forums any longer as it's a waste of your time and ours to try to track it in two places.
I'm still not 100% convinced it is appropriate to try to extract data from a vendor's tool this way. They went to some trouble to obscure it by renaming it with the .mdb extension which probably suggests they don't anticipate their data being used outside their application. That said, you know what you can do now.
