Hello,

My wife decided to reformat her computer so she can reinstall WindowsXp. She used the file and settings transfer wizard which basically converts all of the files into a .dat format and then compresses the files into a huge datastore made up of about 20 or 30 2gig files. She reinstalled XP and the import wizard said that one of the files was corrupt, so it halts the whole thing. So all of our pictures, documents, etc are compressed into this thing. My wife has since converted to Pclinuxos and just uses a winxp virtual machine when she has to, but we would like to get our pictures back if nothing else. The bad thing is that all of the files, whether jpegs, mp3's, excel files, all now have a .dat file format. Is there a script or linux software or anything that we can use to possibly get our stuff back with?

bump !!!!!!!!!!!!!

I've learned of a tool that can extract files from .dat files, which you say your pictures are in. Here's a link: http://www.geocities.com/bbacle2003/. It's called FASTCONV. However, like you would've wanted, it doesn't run on Linux. It's a Windows XP program. I don't know of any .dat file extracters for Linux, sorry. That doesn't mean there is none, but I've never heard of one.

Fortunately, according to what it sounds like you said, you DO have access to Windows XP, via the Virtual Machine. So you could install this on the virtual machine running Windows XP, and do the job there. Then, once your files are extracted, you could use methods to copy and paste the files to your Linux machine, with perhaps a floppy disk or something.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to use this tool, because I haven't needed it, but I heard about it now. But I know it extracts from that kind of file.