Recover Sybase password

Short answer: you can't.

No, seriously. Sybase themselves say in the ASA manuals that they can't recover a password for you.

Also, ASA .db files are not just files you open like you would open a .doc or .xls file. You can't do a thing with it unless you have the database engine that is used to run it. ASA .db files are just low-level device files used as storage by the database engine, and you need that engine to open the database which has been stored in them.

Usually this has to be the same or a very close match to the version of the engine used to create the database stored in that .db file. The driver you mention is likely just the ODBC driver client tools use to talk to the database once the ASA engine was up and running it.

Tell us more about your problem and maybe we can find you another approach. The late grant300 (RIP) once had some success with opening files up in a low-level hex editor, changing a password and noting what bytes had changed, and using that to try to reverse engineer the encrypted form of the password in an existing file. Basically you need some clever hacking to do this. I've never actually attempted this but it doesn't sound very easy. :)

So are you saying that even if I had the username password for the file I still couldn't use the ODBC driver to link the file to, for example, an Access db?

I have the front end to this but I really want to get to the tables