OverrideGdbVersion

Question: I have recently received a DB of features but saved in an ACCESS DB, I can open the DB but cannot get it back into the Personal Geodatabase format. The files are there as tables. Is there a way of doing this?

Replies: Thanks for all the answers, a great place to come for help, very hard to beat anywhere. The reply from Tripp Corbin is below and did the trick, very handy to know.

Jimmy

It is possible the Geodatabase was created in a later version of ArcGIS. There are different version of GDB based on the release of ArcGIS where they add new functionality. While new versions of ArcGIS can read older versions of Geodatabases, older versions of ArcGIS cannot read newer version of GDB. Since you can open it is access there is a table you can edit which will trick ArcGIS into thinking the GDB is an older version. It is the GDB_Releaseinfo table. Here are the values needed to mimic various release of ArcGIS:

 

             Major  Minor  Bugfix
  
ArcGIS 9.1    2       0      1 
ArcGIS 9.2    2       2      0
ArcGIS 9.3    2       3      0

If your problem is caused by the GDB being from a later release than the ArcGIS version you are currently running then changes the field values in Access to match your version above should get you access to the database in ArcCatalog? and ArcMap.

Tripp Corbin, MCP, CFM, GISP