Upgrading your database provides you with lots of benefits. The advanced features added in the new version help you to maintain your database records with ease. While upgradation proves beneficial in most situations, it might also result into corruption of database due to backward-compatibility problems. In such situations, you receive an error message while mounting your Access database, which makes your database records inaccessible. To surmount the after-effects of the error message, an easy way is to restore the data from an updated backup. But, if the backup is corrupt, damaged or inaccessible, then you will need to use a third-party access database repair software to repair your database.

As a practical case, you upgraded your MS Access 2002 database (Employee) to MS Access 2003. However, after the upgradation is complete and you attempt to mount your database, you receive the below error message:

"Cannot open database Employee. It may not be a database that your application recognizes, or the file may be corrupt."

As the error message states, that your Employee database is corrupt after upgradation. Furthermore, you encounter the above error message each time you attempt to access Employee database.

Resolution:

Below are the two ways that help you to resolve the above error message:

Try to open the Employee database in MS Access 2002 version and then save it using a different name(for example Employee_New). If the above resolution does not help, try to repair the corrupted database using an inbuilt repair utility known as "Compact and Repair".

The repair utility helps you to repair the corrupt database in most cases. But, if the repair utility fails to repair and you are still not able to repair your database, then you will need to use powerful Access Database Repair software to repair the database.

Such access repair utilities come with highly interactive user-documentation that makes the repair process easily understandable even to a non-technical user. Moreover, these tools are completely non-destructive in nature and do not make any changes in the original database file.

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