Ark is a frontend for many archiving tools. If the cli tool for a particular format is not installed, Ark usually can't handle the format.

what can be done if it's not a RAR archive but a RAR self-extracting
archive? I want to flash my motherboard bios and the file from
gigabyte says when I run file on it:
(I renamed it to make the filename show up better in dosbox)

$> file mth_bios.exe
mth_bios.exe: MS-DOS executable PE for MS Windows (GUI) Intel 80386 32-bit,
RAR self-extracting archive

so I tried running it in dosbox and it says it's a win32 exe.
Arrgh, why can't they just zip these things. Is there some
way to strip the exe stub off so I just have the RAR archive
part, then make a file out of that so ARK or whatever can
un-rar it?

UPDATE-- I think I found that "unrar" will do the job:

$> unrar lv mth_bios.exe
UNRAR 3.60 beta 2 freeware Copyright (c) 1993-2006 Alexander Roshal

SFX Archive mth_bios.exe

Name Size Packed Ratio Date Time Attr CRC Meth Ver
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
m51gms2g.f5 524288 307627 58% 17-07-06 10:42 .....A. B2336B54 m3e 2.9
autoexec.bat 20 20 100% 21-07-06 13:12 .....A. E5652C78 m0e 2.9
FLASH895.EXE 176886 138004 78% 27-06-06 13:45 .....A. 406D4387 m3e 2.9
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3 701194 445651 63%

----

Mark

hi folks;
I've found a way with "Xarchiver" -a tool in xfce desktop- to rar/unrar packages in Arch, actually there is an add-on for this. they call it "xdg-utils" and it's available in the default pacman repos.

if that didn't worked for u, i guess u should install "rar-beta" with "yaourt", that's what i did