David Underwood’s Professional Blog

In Windows 7 while using SQL Express 2005 on my local dev machine and attempting to restore a database I received the following error:

the operating system returned the error ‘5 access is denied. ‘…

I found a nice posting on the MSDN social site at this link which helped to solve my problem.

Just wanted to say that I had the same problem – I could not restore from a .bak file.

error 5(error not found).
RESTORE HEADERONLY

Using SQL Configuration Manager I changed my Logon to ‘Local System’ and this worked a treat.

So take heart – it does work!!!!

My steps in detail.

1. open up SQL Server Configuration Manager (I am using SQL Server 2005)

2.right click on SQL Sever Express (I assume it is the same for the full version of SQL Server)

3.Choose Properties

4. in the Logon tab – click the built in account radio button and choose ‘Local system’ from the drop down.

This worked for me

I am not sure if this is the most elegant or correct solution but it worked for me for the moment on my dev machine to get my database restored.

Thanks