Advanced Access Password Recovery (ACPR)

This program (Advanced Access Password Recovery, or simply
ACPR) can be used to recover your lost password for Microsoft
Access 95/97/2000 database. In addition, it can remove the password
from the database, or change it to another (your) one (available
for Access 95/97 databases only).

The program is a GUI application; you can run it bu just
selecting the "Advanced Access Password Recovery" menu item from
the appropriate program group created during installation.
Alternatively, you can double-click on "acpr.exe" in the folder
you've installed ACPR to.

The main program window is quite simple, and contains just a few
buttons, status Window, and an option (the option will be
explained later).

To open the Access database for password recovering, press the
"Open file..." button (the left one). If the file you select is
a valid password-protected Access 95/97 database, the following
information will be displayed in the status window:

Trying to open a source file test.mdb ...
File test.mdb successfully opened (Access 95/97)
Found the password: 'Test' (without quotes; copied to the Clipboard)
Password in hex: 54 65 73 74
Now you can change or disable the password

Please note that unregistered version shown only first three
letters of the password, and the other ones (4th and up) are
replaced with '#' characters (the length of the password is
correct, however); password in hex is not shown at all. To see
the complete password (in both forms), please consider purchasing
the full version.

If the file is not a database, or has been created using older
version of Access (2.0), or doesn't have the password at all, an
appropriate message will be displayed.

If the password is recovered and the database has been crated in
Access 95/97 (but not Access 2000), the next two buttons become
available (in registered version): "Delete password" and "Change
password". The first one just removes the protection from the
given database; and the second ones allows to change the
password to any one of your choice. Just note that if the
file is read-only or on the read-only disk, the changes will not
be done (you'll see the error message); just copy that file to
another location, and clear the read-only attribute (if needed).

Caution: please use these features (change and delete the
password) with a GREAT care! If ACPR has shown some "unusual"
characters in the password (something other than latin letters,
digits and special chars like @,$,% etc), it may mean that the
database is corrupted. Please be sure that the option "Backup
source file" is enabled, and don't delete the original file
(backup -- with the .bak extension), until you'll see that
database can be opened without any problems in MS Access! If
you'll get any troubles with the newdatabase (without the
password, or with your new one), you'll have a chance to
rollback the changes.

Please note that sometime the daabase looks password-protected
(and so you get the password prompt when trying to open it),
while actually it doesn't. It means that the file is corrupted;
for more information, please look at Microsoft articles:

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q243/8/95.asp
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q246/0/33.asp

ACPR recognize most of such databases successfully (and displays
an appropriate message), but anyway -- if you see that the
password looks really strange (conains some funny ASCII characters
etc), be careful!



Home page URL : http://www.elcomsoft.com/acpr.html