Why won't Access 2013 open an .mdb file?

Question

Please not that I hardly ever use Access, so I might be missing something very obvious here, but a quick Google revealed little.

I am trying to open an .mdb file used by an in-house application, using Access 2013 Preview. This tells me "Cannot open a database created with a previous version of your application."

I have trouble just accepting that Access 2013 cannot open Access files from before Access 2007, so I suspect something else is amiss here. What could cause this issue?

The database file is not corrupt, as the VB6 application can open, read, and update it just fine.

Answer 1

Check to see what format is being used for the database. it's possible that it's using a Jet 3.5 database, which is no longer supported, and cannot be opened directly: (source)

VB6 only supports Access 97 straight out of the box, and has to have service packs applied to support newer versions: (source)

After a little more research, Access 2013 supports Access 2000 and later versions through Access 2010, and requires databases made in earlier versions to be converted using an earlier version of Access (source)