F.A.S.T. backup on Win7

[z28Nemesis]

Hi, I've been looking around all evening and have seen several people with this issue, but none have found a solution. To the point. Tonight I dug an old hard drive from an XP machine I haven't had in years, the drive is so worn out that the spindle has a whine to it, and if I remember right, wouldn't boot because it would simply stop spinning. I can, however, get it to spin up in an external enclosure for USB and I realize that I had moved most the data off the drive (there's a a specific text file I'm looking for and can't find) but I DID find an old backup from F.A.S.T. in USMT2.UNC folder, containing IMG00001.DAT and STATUS files and have no way of opening it. Windows Easy Transfer don't know what this file is, and when I force it to work, it "cannot open file." I realize the simple answer is that I need the XP machine to do this the practical way, and I have a few parts from it here and there (it was a classic Slot A Athlon) and as I stated before, the drive will spin up (though I can hear the spindle struggling to maintain a steady speed when used) but isn't stable enough to boot. It's simply too worn out to boot from. There's been sooooo many very similar forum posts made on the subject, but since all were 09-10, thought I'd ask again, since new utils may have been written since then. I don't care about any system settings, only the raw files stored in this DAT file, is there any way I can retrieve them?

 

[hang-the-9]

A Google search does not come up with any backup software with those initials, exactly what did you use to make this backup? The file name makes it seem like you made an image of the drive, not just a backup.

 

[z28Nemesis]

Apparently, I used Files & Settings Transfer Wizard (FAST) which is uncommon for me, but seeing as there's only a few system files and that DAT file left on the drive, that has to be what it is. It's IMG00001.DAT in folder USMT2.UNC, which is where FAST puts its files. The drive is too unstable and worn out to boot from, but it stayed stable long enough to copy this folder to my Win7 hdd via a USB enclosure. If there's no way to open the file, its fine, but I just wanna see what answers I get.. never know till u ask.

 

[hang-the-9]

I'm pretty sure you need another XP machine to restore those files. It's not really a backup, more for moving settings from one XP installation to another. So get a system with XP on it, log on as a new user (so as not to mess up the regular user accounts), and restore the files using the wizard. Then copy them normally to the Windows 7 computer.