Re: Table Corruption - Any other suggestions

#1

Oscar,

1. Start keeping backups!

2. ChimneySweep: http://www.sundialservices.com/ - no guarantee
though.

Liz

"Oscar Santiesteban Jr." wrote:

Quote:

Here is the problem. As usual NO backup at customer site.

One table got corrupted. When you try to open it, it gives the nasty "fail
open" or "open read only". The "customer.mb" blob file is corrupt.
If I open read only, I can see the memo field where customer history is
kept. When I click on the field, the memo field "goes empty".

I have tried Pdox 9 table repair and Pdox 10 table repair and both give a
"GPF" and aborts Paradox. When I come back to the table, the table is empty.
Not good to say the least. The table is a LEVEL 4 table. I tried the old
DOS tutility to repair and it also does not work. Both show errors upon
verifying the database.

Any other ideas on how to recover database?? Has about 5000 records and is
about 3 MB .

#2

: Any other ideas on how to recover database??

Invent a time machine and go back and few months, and force them to start a
backup routine.

Seriously, have you tried ChimneySweep? Not sure it could do any better on
those tables. Maybe Mike will stop by and be able to tell you more based on
your description.

--
--
Tony

"I woke up and was able to get myself out of bed.
Being that fortunate, what's to complain about?"
_____________

#3

I once wrote a routine that uses the tutility to allow verification and
rebuild of a number of tables and have often found that it would open a
table for repair when the built in table repair could not. I think Bertil
has it on his site.

And I also recommend ChimneySweep.

HTH,
Carolyn

"Oscar Santiesteban Jr." <oscarsantiesteban (AT) worldnet (DOT) att.net> wrote in
message news:NprMa.32279$3o3.2341750 (AT) bgtnsc05-news (DOT) ops.worldnet.att.net...

Quote:

Here is the problem. As usual NO backup at customer site.

One table got corrupted. When you try to open it, it gives the nasty
"fail
open" or "open read only". The "customer.mb" blob file is corrupt.
If I open read only, I can see the memo field where customer history is
kept. When I click on the field, the memo field "goes empty".

I have tried Pdox 9 table repair and Pdox 10 table repair and both give a
"GPF" and aborts Paradox. When I come back to the table, the table is
empty.
Not good to say the least. The table is a LEVEL 4 table. I tried the old
DOS tutility to repair and it also does not work. Both show errors upon
verifying the database.

Any other ideas on how to recover database?? Has about 5000 records and
is
about 3 MB .

#4

Yes I do Mike. I have it on a .zip file that I got from the customer.
What do you suggest?? I can not send these files to anyone as they have the
SSN as the primary key along with some sensitive info.

"Mike Irwin [CTech]" <mirwin (AT) paradoxcommunity (DOT) com> wrote

Quote:

do you still have copies of the .db and .mb files from before
you started trying to recover them ?

Mike

#5

The memo-file format is definitely the weak link in Paradox. There is
not the usual amount of redundant information linking one file to
another. There is also a lot of sloppy (buggy?) data handling....
duplicate copies of the same data are not uncommon, data does not get
cleaned up the way it's supposed to.... and if the values do get
disconnected it can be very hard to reconnect them.

Paradox Table Repair generally barfs completely on memos; it simply sets
the bad ones to null and sometimes /all/ of them.

ChimneySweep does much better overall but realize that it's doing the
best it can. Sometimes it succeeds in connecting an "orphan" data block
with its "mommy" and sometimes the problem is literally impossible to
solve unambiguously. And sometimes of course the data simply isn't
there at all. (If a table with memo-fields is extended and then the
application blows, the odds are unfortunately high that the latest
memo-block will not have been written to disk.)

Yeah, I've had a =lot= of "experience" with this part of the program.
;-)

Quote:

One table got corrupted. When you try to open it, it gives the nasty "fail
open" or "open read only". The "customer.mb" blob file is corrupt.
If I open read only, I can see the memo field where customer history is
kept. When I click on the field, the memo field "goes empty".

====
Fast! table repair at a click of the mouse! See ChimneySweep(R) at
http://www.sundialservices.com/products/chimneysweep

#6

well, one could start pulling the files apart, with C or Delphi.
If one knows the structure one then knows which bytes "belong"
to which fields, and so one should be able to do things like
determine the pointer in the .db table out into the .mb table,
and then rescue the text there.

Mike

In article <UoMMa.34042$0v4.2474126@bgtnsc04-
news.ops.worldnet.att.net>, oscarsantiesteban (AT) worldnet (DOT) att.net
says...

Quote:

Yes I do Mike. I have it on a .zip file that I got from the customer.
What do you suggest?? I can not send these files to anyone as they have the
SSN as the primary key along with some sensitive info.

"Mike Irwin [CTech]" <mirwin (AT) paradoxcommunity (DOT) com> wrote in message
news:MPG.196ccd0cff95b10a9896da (AT) pnews (DOT) thedbcommunity.com...
do you still have copies of the .db and .mb files from before
you started trying to recover them ?

Mike

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Re: Table Corruption - Any other suggestions

comp.databases.paradox comp.databases.paradox

Re: Table Corruption - Any other suggestions - 07-01-2003 , 10:02 PM

Re: Table Corruption - Any other suggestions - 07-01-2003 , 10:05 PM

Re: Table Corruption - Any other suggestions - 07-02-2003 , 04:38 PM

Re: Table Corruption - Any other suggestions - 07-02-2003 , 09:19 PM

Re: Table Corruption - Any other suggestions - 07-02-2003 , 11:07 PM

Re: Table Corruption - Any other suggestions - 07-03-2003 , 09:19 AM