corrupted records in Access

[Paul Bender]

If you do decide on a new database, create it and import
the table (and other objects) from the old one. You
don't have to re-type and the import may just bypass any
corrupted rows. To start importing into your new
database, go to File, Get External Data, and it's pretty
intuitive from there. Doing that a couple times will
build your confidence and you're off and running from
there. Paul

-----Original Message-----
We have an Access database with 1700+ patient names.

About 3 months ago, we noticed that one of the records in
our database was corrupted - square boxes appeared in the
place of some letters and we couldn't delete it or change
it. Trying to delete it caused Access to shut down. We
called our IT department and they said it happens
sometimes, especially if the database is old. It is
about 3 yrs old. We didn't have any more problems until
just this week when we noticed that another 2 records
were corrupted. Upon trying to delete them, we got the
message: "The search key was not found in any record."
When we tried to click on help, it shut Access down. So,
I'm wondering if this is something we should worry about
and if so, how we might deal with it. Should we make a
new database? (Please say "no" because we have over 1750
records we'd have to re-type

 

[Sandra Daigle]

Hi Paul,

While you are correct that retyping records will probably not be necessary I
think it is also important to note that importing a table with corrupt data
is probably not going to fix the problem - in most cases I suspect you'll
just end up importing the corrupt record along with the table. Instead, you
will probably have to import just the table definition of the corrupt table
then use append queries to pull the good data from the corrupt table - you
just have to isolate the damaged records and query around them.

Take a look at the section of the following page titled "Locating damage via
append queries as described by Peter Miller".
http://www.granite.ab.ca/access/corruptmdbretrievedata.htm

I have used this method successfully when none of the other methods worked
(and I was just shy of contacting Peter Miller's company).