Dealing with error 5171 in SQL

When a user works with MS SQL Server 2005 and creates a report, he may face technical problems. Windows server may restart due to power failure and the user gets a screen prompting for the reason and information for restart of Server. Due to this OS issue, the SQL database becomes inaccessible.

Moreover, when the user tries to attach the MDF manually, the following error message appears:

“An exception occurred while executing a Transact-SQL statement or batch. <database name>_db.mdf is not a primary database file. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 5171).”

Or something like,

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\Data\MYDATABASE.mdf is not a primary database file. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 5171)”

Cause of the Error

MDF file corruption is the main cause of the above error message. The above issue occurs when the MDF file header gets corrupted or due to insertion of some invalid information in the header file. All these situations result in inaccessibility of the SQL database.

Resolution

As a first step user needs to recover the SQL Server database from the latest backup. If backup copy is not available then use SQL recovery software. SQL recovery tools are third party products that ensure complete and accurate recovery from corrupt .MDF database file. Using a good quality data recovery tool, the user can successfully recover all types of data enclosed in the damaged .mdf file.

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