How to open Access from the old drive?

[Flannery]

I have a client that had an employee intentionally permanently delete their work off a laptop. This employee also uninstalled the programs associated with some of the data. Using data recovery software I was able to recover everything that had been deleted that had not been over-written. I was able to recover some files that had been partially overwritten and figured that more than likely this would corrupt data files so they would not open. So far I have been able to open most of the Excel files and Word documents. I have not however been able to open any of the Access Databases. I have tried opening the Databases with Access 2007 and with OpenOffice in hopes that I could access the data and possibly resave it. I still have the old drive that I can extract data from and have specifically searched the deleted data for these Access Databases and made sure that I was getting one that was 100% intact. I was still unable to open these databases to view. I receive an error message that the database is in an unrecognized format in both Microsoft Access and OpenOffice. I really need to be able to access some of this data if not all of it, any help would be appreciated.

[NTC]

file extension? .accdb? .mdb? do you know the vintage/edition that it was being used? i.e. 2007?

[orange]

Sounds like at least parts of the files you need have been overwritten and - unrecoverable.
Your situation is exactly why good data management practices do backups of important files/databases onto other storage.

As you probably know, earlier versions of Access used .mdb file format, and with 2007 used .accdb. Accdb could not be read in earlier version --you get unrecognized format notice.

Good luck.