Despite taking all the necessary steps to avoid database corruption, you may find yourself having to repair MDB files that contain all the Access data. If you suspect that the MDB file you are dealing with is corrupt, the first thing you should do is to make a copy of the corrupted MDB file ' make sure that you do so while Access is not running. You should also be careful that you do not overwrite any backups that you may have taken previously. This will allow you to recover some data from the backups even if recovery of the corrupted MDB file does not happen successfully and the Access repair does not restore all your data.
Your next step would be to use the built-in Microsoft Access repair utility ' this lets you quickly work on damaged files and is fairly successful most of the times. In Access 2007, you can choose Manage from the main File Menu and for earlier versions of Access, you can choose Database Utilities from the main Tools Menu. This utility should help you get rid of a corrupted object and may even work with corrupted indexes. However, if the repair utility does not work, it may indicate that the errors in the MDB file are not standard errors that the repair utility is used to handling. If the file is seriously damaged, you may have to use third-party software such as Advanced Access Repair from DataNumen to carry out an Access repair. However, before you turn to other tools, based on the error message, you could try one or more of the following to see if you could restore your database.
· If you cannot open a form or report, the problem could be in the specific forms, reports or even in the code in their modules. To deal with this kind of corruption, create a new database and import all objects into the new database. Import the tables and all objects such as macros, modules, forms, queries, etc. From Tools -> References, set minimal References. Now try to compile; if any form or report is corrupt, the process will stop and will indicate to you which one of the objects has not been imported. You can now try importing all other objects except the ones that you suspect are damaged. Try importing these from an earlier backup.
· At times, the number of records in your database may vary depending on how you are sorting the data and is usually due to a corruption of the index. In this case you should start by deleting any relationships that you may have associated with the table. Now create a new table, append all the data you have from the old table and reapply the relationships as well as the indexes that you had destroyed earlier.