DBF Repair Tools

[TimStone]

A client has a corrupted database. a file is showing 197,000 records but only about 10,000 are actually valid. The rest display as blank.

First I utilized DBF Doctor to do a repair but it only found about 30 bad records.

Then I used DBU to filter out only valid records, and tried to export them. I used the filter .NOT. EMPTY( fieldname ). However they must have something embedded in there because the filter doesn't work.
I used Advantage Architect to also try to filter out the blanks, but that doesn't eliminate them either.

Does anyone have suggestions for a really good DBF file repair tool ? Lots claim to be but I think they all do the same thing. Back in the DOS days we had a great one but it never transitioned to Windows ( or 32 bit ).

I appreciate your input.

Tim

[cnavarro]

Tim, What tool are you referring to?

[TimStone]

There are software programs that fix .dbf files that have been corrupted. There are several on the internet but some may not be legitimate.

Repairs might including repair of headers, removing non data characters, removing false end of file markers, etc. They also can re-align records are offset.

Most errors are OS/disk caused, often from adding in sectors from the drive that don’t belong.


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[Sakis]

Hello Tim
Take a look here: http://www.dbf2002.com/dbf-recovery/


Besst Regards
Sakis

[James Bott]

Tim,

Then I used DBU to filter out only valid records, and tried to export them. I used the filter .NOT. EMPTY( fieldname ). However they must have something embedded in there because the filter doesn't work.

I would write a routine to replace all the fake blank fields with all real blanks. Of course, you first need to find out which non-blank characters are showing visually as blanks.

Finally, you can add a routine to check for those offending characters in the Save() method so each time a record gets saved it is fixed before saving.

James 

[Giovany Vecchi]

Tim, how are you?

Are the DBFs you refer to being managed by the Advantage Database Server?
If it's ads, do you use free tables or a data dictionary?

[TimStone]

In this case, no. Using data architect, I tried filtering for not empty but it still includes them


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[James Bott]

Tim,

Can you tell us which characters aren't visible? Better yet would be a few records that contain the problem characters.

James