Tables suddenly gone PLZ HELP

[Gary Phillips]

Have had a hundred or more tables in database for years. Now suddenly while trying to open a default browse for any of the tables I get error " Error no such table occurred while trying to start application." Get same error if I try to view indexes.

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Tables suddenly gone PLZ HELP

Are the icons for the tables greyed out in the control panel?

Have you recently restored them from a backup? Perhaps from a CD?

Have you moved them to a new computer? Perhaps placing them in a different path?

-- t

[Gary Phillips]

RE: Tables suddenly gone PLZ HELP

no to all
also correction, I was able to get into some tables but obviously did not check all of them. After I acknowledge the error message I then get another message the A5 will do a forced termination and it does.

[Gary Phillips]

RE: Tables suddenly gone PLZ HELP

Not sure what happened but here is the fix just in case anyone runs into a similar problem.
I happened to have a copy of the the affected tables from earlier in the day in a different directory which I was able to open. I renamed the original ( corrupted )tables and placed the good copies into the database . Realizing that there were many additional records in the tables between the copy and the original that went bad at the end of the day, I appended the additional records from the original bad table to the copied table. Fortunately these tables were not subject to changes, only new records.

[martinwcole]

RE: Tables suddenly gone PLZ HELP

Gary, I ran into something like that once. I eventually reasoned that the database dictionary was the problem. And as I recall it had gotten messed up from renaming the database.

if it isn't too late, and you saved a copy of folder, try copying all the files that have the name matching your adb from a known earlier version. Then compact.

[Steve Workings]

RE: Tables suddenly gone PLZ HELP

Martin --

Gary's my customer, and as I worked through this with him, in order to track down the problem, I decided we needed to figure out if the problem was in the table's data dictionary, the database data dictionary, or the table itself.

We went through the exercise of deleting the table's dictionary, but still couldn't even open the default browse.

Next, though I didn't have much faith or reason to try this (because we were now working with a default browse on a table with no effective data dictionary with relations to any items in the code tab), we replaced the .al* files with an older version from a couple weeks ago. Still couldn't open the default browse.

So, the conclusion was a problem in the table itself. Gary had a backup of the table from about 4 hours before the trouble occurred, so recovery from that was the remaining choice.

Still dunno what happened. Sometimes you have to say "It's only a computer" but when you're working with the critical info that Gary has to run his company, that's not very satisfying.

- Steve

[csda1]

RE: Tables suddenly gone PLZ HELP

Steve,

If your table is corrupted, it is almost certainly the dbf header or file size that has been trashed, otherwise it would have probably been accessible to some degree. A DBF file repair utility might have been able to resurrect it.

I had a client that had issues that ended up being a bad server hard drive card being intermittently bad (it would trash a sector every once in a great while). One easy solution was to turn Verify after write option on, and the problem never returned. We lost about a 3% throughput in speed, but it was better than trying to resurrect their dbf every couple of weeks.

The rest of the file would normally be OK in which case

Hope this helps Gary (say hi to Lew too!)

Regards,

Ira

[Gary Phillips]

RE: Tables suddenly gone PLZ HELP

Not exactly sure what you mean by terminate after write but will refer that to my network consultant.

However, just had the very same problem happen with the same table. This time we caught it real quick and did not need to do a restore. This is what I did to get around the problem. Not sure if this info helps determine the cause but here goes:
Immediately after seeing we had the problem again I 1. Did a DOS copy of the bad DBF file to my local drive 2. Renamed it.
3. Added to my control panel. 4 Opened default browse with no problem. ( unable to do this with original table) 5. Dropped old bad table from database. 6. Renamed dbf in local drive to original table name and did DOS copy back to original shared drive. 7. Did DOS copy of tablename.cdx, & .d* files that I had from last week on my local drive, back to the shared drive.
We are again working fine but for how long, I dunno

[G Gabriel]

RE: Tables suddenly gone PLZ HELP

Gary:
1-If your data is sensetive (and whose data isn't !), and
2-If you enter too many records to back up frequently enough, and
3-If your motherboard allows it
Then:
I suggest you use RAID-1 and save yourself a lot of future headache.
Gabe