KenK wrote:
KenK wrote in
:

I have a computer which badly needs a reinstall of Windows XP. I tried
the reinstall disk that came with the computer and a XP Reinstall disk
I bought. Neither works.

The computer has Ntbackup installed and perhaps I made a backup years
ago when the computer worked properly. Trouble is, Ntbackup files
don't have extensions so I can't find any. No obvious directory names
for such files.

Any distinctive content in an Ntbackup file I can use Start Search
to find?

I can't remember how to look inside a file so I can look in some
Ntbackup files for something distinctive on another computer. Help?

TIA



BTW, I tried using Notepad. Says file too large. Tried MS Word. Seems to
only work with word processor files.

The example of an ntbackup file I had here, ends in .bkf .

Make sure you have File Explorer set so that it shows file
extensions.

ntbackup.chm

In Backup media or file name, do one of the following:

If you are backing up files and folders to a file, type a path
and file name for the backup (.bkf) file...

You can get HxD from here. This opens big files. When
run from an Administrator account, you can even open entire
disk drives for raw I/O ("search" missions). This is a hex
editor. What it makes up for in "ugly", it compensates
by being fast (search at 600MB/sec on a good disk),
as well as large (search huge huge files). I've easily
searched 25GB files for text strings with this. On my
RAM drive.

https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

Here, I dropped my 1.6GB MYBACKUP.bkf into HxD. You can
scroll through the backup for fun if you want.

https://i.postimg.cc/WbKbhtQh/hxd-for-big-files.gif

*******

For additional comedy, download the "strings" program.
There is really no excuse for this program to not run on WinXP!
Processing text strings, should not require Windows 10.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sys...nloads/strings

strings === if there is a EULA, click to cancel/approve

strings /? === get the help first

strings -n 12 H:\mybackup.bkf L:\anybodyhome.txt === run it
dir L:\anybodyhome.txt === too big ???
notepad L:\anybodyhome.txt === open output

The value of N=12 ensures that a lot of four character
binary sequences are not thrown into the TXT output.
This value is a tradeoff between "thoroughness" versus
"too big of an output file". Adjust N as you see fit.
The default N is 3, which is too small for humans.

Now, my output file is still too large. The original file is
1.6GB. The text output file is 180MB, so about 10% of the
original file size.

At the very top of the text file, I see

MYBACKUP.bkf created 11/15/2015 at 9:54 AMMTF Media Label
|1.0|Seagate|NTBackup5.0|2015/11/15.14:54:40|Seagate 2015/11/15.14:54:40
|1|{5D3602A4-3EF6-4E64-B3F0-2C3602A378CE}||Backup Utility (NTBACKUP.EXE)
Version 1.0 Rev. 3.41 Set created 11/15/2015 at 9:54 AM
GOLDFISH\User Name

where GOLDFISH was likely to be the machine name. That file is
from a long time ago, so I can't be sure of that. The machine
is named BOB today :-)

Now, if you do it this way, you won't need that huge file.
This processes only the first million bytes of the source file.
Now the output will open in Notepad, for sure.

strings -n 12 -b 1000000 H:\mybackup.bkf L:\anybodyhome.txt

I get the very top of the file doing it that way, so I
can find out my machine was named GOLDFISH.

Have fun,
Paul