Professional Repair Services
If you are not a technical person, or you need help repairing your corrupt paradox tables, or you want ongoing Paradox support, you can open a Prestwood Support Account and we'll help your company maintain your Paradox tables and/or Paradox for Windows application.

• Prestwood Support Account

Do-it Yourself!

If you wish to maintain your own Paradox tables, then you need to become familiar with Table Repair so you can fix corrupt Paradox tables and indexes. Table Repair offers both verify and repair options. However, if you are experiencing problems, please understand that verify only checks a few known problem areas, it does not know every possible problem. You MUST rebuild the table in order to be sure it has no problems. I've rebuilt thousands of Paradox tables and, if the data is in the table, it will repair it -- almost always. Out of the thousands of times I've only run into about a half dozen times when a rebuild failed but the data was still semi-usable. Under that scenario, I exported the data to a text file. Recreated the table from scratch (do not borrow the table structure), then imported the text data. Again, this is extremely rare but you should be aware of this situation in case you run into it.

However, if the data isn't in the file, Table Repair will not help. You need to restore from a backup. One for sure example of this is if you know the data in the .DB data file is a certain size (i.e. 30MB), but the .DB file for the table you are repairing is much smaller (i.e. 3MB), then the data physically doesn't exist and Table Repair will not help. Restore from a backup.

Need Table Repair and don't have Paradox?

If you don't have Paradox, download our table repair file. You can purchase it from Corel, purchase any of the many commercial table repair utilities, or download one of the free Table Repair utilities available.

You can purchase any of the many commercial table repair utilities to process more than one table at a time. We recommend Chimney Sweep:

• ChimneySweep 5.1 for Windows by Sundial Services
   

Borland offers a down-loadable Table Repair utility (and source code if you wish to write your own). Because which files to download is a bit confusing to newbies, we've made available the following download:

• Borland TUtility wrapped up in a Prestwood Installation (435KB)
  This Win32 program will verify and rebuild Paradox version 7.x or less tables. To be clear,  this program was not written by us. We simply packaged up the appropriate two files from Borland's BDE Utilities and Updates page in an installation program.
   
   

Paradox Table Repair Step-by-Step

If you own Paradox for Windows, you can verify and/or rebuild any table. The following are step by step instructions for repairing a Paradox table with Paradox for Windows. In this tutorial we will first verify the Customer table located in Paradox's Samples folder then rebuild it.

Verify Table Integrity or Rebuild Table

1. Because table repair requires a full lock on each table it rebuilds, make sure all BDE users (Paradox and non-Paradox apps) have exited. Kick them out or wait unti after hours if necessary.
2. [Optional] Check for and remove *.lck files.
3. Open Table Repair. In Paradox 9, you select Tools | Table Repair...
    
   
    
   This option brings up Table Repair...
   
    
4. Select Browse to choose the table your wish to verify and/or repair. You'll notice you can browse to the table using Windows' file browsing system or you can select the BDE alias that contains the table.
    
   
    
5. Select the customer table and press Open.
    
   
    
   Notice that table repair reads the table header and provides basic information about the table. For example, it identifies the particular Paradox table version. In the case above, the File Format is Paradox 7.
    
6. Select Verify and Table Repair will very the table header, index, and data then move onto each of your secondary indexes.
    
   
    
   If the table passes the table verify, you will get the following dialog:
    
   
    
   If the verify catches errors, this is where table repair will notify you.
    
7. Whether or not you received errors, let's rebuild the customer table to demonstrate how to rebuild a table. Select Rebuild.
    
   Once Table Repair completes successfully, the following dialog is displayed:
   
   
   Followed by a dialog that informs you that a copy of the "original" table was backed up. I recommend you keep these copies until you verify your data. Perhaps even backup and archive these copies. If a copy already exists, Table Repair adds a number to the filename "(2)".
    
   
    
   

Now that you've verified and rebuilt the customer table, you can rebuild your suspect tables.