FiveTech Support Forums

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

Tim, What tool are you referring to?

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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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.

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?

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

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Tim,

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

James