David,

This indicates a serious error in your Q&A database.  The design and/or some of your records are seriously compromised.  This needs to be repaired before you can use the database.  It can have to do with your indexes, damage to your form design, your actual data, your network connectivity, or even damage caused by a virus.

Call PCTA at 215/598-8440.  They do this kind of repair all of the time.

Q&A 4.0 has a recovery mode, which I have had good luck using.  It is faster and cheaper then calling in outside help, if it works.  I never had funds to get help, so was lucky that Recovery worked most of the time.

Thanks all for the suggestions.

Sending file out for repair is not an option.

Further investigation indicates that records using a modified record layout were somehow forced into the database, (have no idea how), anyways it resulted in records with field values in the wrong field (ie. page count value in the archive field, organization name id the coded data field etc.). This in turn appears to have corrupted the database structure and indices. End result was a database that could be read and searched but not updated.

Identifying and deleting records with bad formatting returned the database to a state where recovery would run without causing an error.

I then ran an ascii export of before and after, compared the export files using excel and created a spreadsheet containing the deleted record data.

This record data can be analysed, reformatted and imported as required.

Thanks again for the assist.

Dave
a Q&A and Sesame NEWBIE

I've been uncertain where to bring this up, but since Erika mentions the 5.0 "generation" problem this seems like as good a place & time as any.

While talking with John Dow, who created the excellent DTFDOCTR and DTFSPECS utilities which I am using to clean up my Q&A programs pre-translation to Sesame, I mentioned that my two largest databases had dozens (hundreds?) of saved specs and reports, all of which had to be "touched" to get to a single generation.  I told him I expected to spend several days working on this.

John provided me with a marvelous Q&A macro that did this work for me in minutes.  Once it ran I was at a single generation (generation 4, in the case of my Workorder database), which allowed me to then copy the design without corruption.  After copying my records into this fresh copy, I was at Generation 1.  Took less than an hour.

I mentioned to John that other folks here might be interested in using this.  He asked me to post about it and gauge the reaction, and based on that he might package it with DTFDOCTR.

If anyone is interested, his web site is http://johntdow.com/ and his email is info@johntdow.com.

I apologize if this sounds like a Spam posting.  I'm not sure if posts about services and goods are allowed on this forum, and I won't bring it up again if I've violated any guidelines.