Error 3049

[Brian Schwartz]

Hi all,

A year ago I did a small consulting project in Access 97. They called last
week saying it was "freezing up". I went out there today and it was working
perfectly. They called this afternoon and said it was stopping again. This
time they gave me an error number, 3049--something about it being locked or
in use and it wouldn't let them in, even though they swear no one else was
in it (it is located on a server and about 4 people have shortcuts to it). I
can think of no reason why, or way, for someone to have it opened
exclusively. The error comes and goes for no apparent reason.

The database is not large, about 9500 records in the main table, and just
three forms with a small amount of code.

My biggest frustration is that I have not been able to find any
documentation on Access or Access VBA error messages, either in my own copy
of MS Office 2000, or online at MSDN.

What might be going on, or what else can I try to figure this out?

Thanks much,
Brian Schwartz

 

[Allen Browne]

Open the Immediate Window (Ctrl+G), and enter:
? AccessError(3049)
Access replies:
Cannot open database '|'. It may not be a database that your
application recognizes, or the file may be corrupt.
This suggests that the file has been corrupted, possibly beyond what the end
user can fix.

Before doing anything else, make a copy of the corrupted mdb file while
Access is NOT running, and without overwriting any earlier backups. This
lets you try different approaches and sequences if necessary.

Second, delete any ldb file in the same folder. (This contains locking info
that is spurious after a crash.)

Next, try the built-in repair utility: Tools | Database Utilities |
Compact/Repair. This very simple solution may work with corrupted indexes,
and might even get rid of a corrupted object. There's a fairly good chance
that this will simply fail to open the database. If so, you can try
downloading jetcomp from Microsoft, but no promises:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;295334

There are several things you need to do to prevent corruption recurring. The
most obvious one is to split the database, so each use has a local copy of
the front end, though they share the same data. For more suggestions, see:
Preventing Corruption
at:
http://allenbrowne.com/ser-25.html