Updated 2015-04-12
- ZAR Recovery Program
When I trashed the directory structure of my music computer, I knew I was in big trouble. Fortunately I had another hard drive I could use for the boot drive so I was able to CAREFULLY try some public domain and even Linux software to attempt to recover my precious system. I could probably have reassembled it from a huge collection of DVD backups but I had the feeling only the file system structure was damaged; not the data itself…
Since none of this was urgent, I had the luxury to try some various approaches. I have to say that the Linux tools approach did not work for me, although that doesn’t mean it won’t for you.
I ended up actually paying the nominal cost for the “ZAR” recovery software. I must say that it definitely worked like a charm. It took many, many hours to recover the gigabytes of data, and some sectors did show up as lost but by and large I am hugely satisfied with it.
- BKF format – good news update
Updating this in April 2015; some ingenious person discovered that you could indeed read .bkf files through a very simple process. Basically you get the ntbackup.exe file and two other .dlls from an XP system and just put them in folder on your windows 7 system, and launch the .exe. This brings up the old faithful backup/restore application and I proved that it works fine. Unfortunately I don’t have the names handy of the .dlls but will put them here next time I get on the other system.
Microsoft claims to have a solution which is in one of their knowledgebase articles Windows NT Backup Restore Utility for Windows 7 and for Windows Server 2008 R2 (“http://support.microsoft.com/kb/974674”) but it did not work for me. I downloaded the fix files that were supposed to allow manipulation of bkf files but they didn’t work. The application appeared but as soon as you tried to execute any function it crashed.
Here’s my original comments on this issue:
Another problem with Windows 7 is the infamous .bkf format problem. From everything I read, basically there is no support anymore for reading files created by the old Backup tools. Again I have many GB of files in that format. Once again the third party vendors have created programs that unscrew that format, and Microsoft has no help for your whatever. I wish ZAR had a program in that category since I would love to give them additional business. So far I have decided that since I have recovered my old HD largely successfully, I don’t have an urgent need to decode the old .bkfs.
Page#21/last modified 20150412
crow caw music works 