MS access 2003 security problem

[rhyds]

One of our pupils has forgotten the admin password for his secured access 2003 .MDB. Does anyone know of a simple way to "break in" or what the default password is? We've tried downloading one type of password recovery program, but the download failed.

[bizzel]

I have in the past used Access Key and that's worked well. It also supports Access 2007, which is nice. It's not free but the demo version will show the first two letters of the password - that might be enough to jog your student's memory. I'd also look at running it on either an unused workstation or a beefy server overnight since if you enable options like symbols, capitals, etc (and you should) it'll take some time.

[rhyds]

Thanks for the speedy reply, the problem is that he's apparently used the "user level security" system in access 2003 and it's gone wrong.

[mac_shinobi]

just so I am clear on how he/she set the security and or password on this database can you give me a basic step by step on what he/she did originally to set the password.

 

Thanks

[rhyds]

I think they ran the database user level security wizard and created their own user for their database, now it seems that that user does not have full access rights for the DB, and the user can't access their tables. The ownership of these come up as "unknown" when we try and change ownership to allow access.

 

I'm at the moment trying to recover a backup so that the student doesn't loose too much work, but it's getting rather fraught

[rhyds]

Problem fixed!

 

Turns out there was an issue with the workgroup file (the user had about 4), process of elimination lead us to the right one, and we then extracted the work from the MDB.

 

6th former informed of the concept of "back up before applying security"....