Wednesday, April 14, 2010

BKF Corrupted: ASR Restore Procedure Failed

Microsoft has always vied to provide its customers with innovative and user friendly technology. In tune with the same, Windows XP and its later versions include a feature called ASR or Automated System Recovery that can be used to simplify the recovery procedure of boot and system volumes of computer. ASR is simply an extension of a conventional backup and restore tool in Windows XP, which only backs up data that is essential for restoring the system configuration and not the other user data. When dealing with ASR, it is essential that user ensure that their BKF file doesn't reside on the system or boot volume. Ignoring this can bring serious consequences and even corrupt the backup file. In such situations, there is no option left but to use an BKF repair tool.

For further clarification, let's consider a realistic scenario of Windows XP Professional computer. Suppose you create a BKF file when performing an ASR backup for storing all the essential data for any future restoration needs. You select the primary drive, which is usually C, as the destination drive to store this BKF file.

After this, an accidental file deletion or a similar data loss event occurs and you want to restore the data from your BKF file. But when you run ASR restore procedure to get back this data, it cannot be proceeded and you receive an error message suggesting that the backup file is corrupt.

Cause:
Windows backup file itself is corrupted. As mentioned earlier, this occurs because, you choose system or boot drive for BKF file, which is partitioned during ASR procedure. Repartitioning the system and boot volume can lead to corruption of backup file which ultimately results in failure of ASR restore procedure.

Solution:
To avoid such issues from occurring, you should not store the BKF file on a system or boot volume before running ASR.

However, to extract data from a corrupted BKF file, you need a third-party Backup Repair Tool. These are exclusive programs built to repair BKF File created by Windows backup utility to restore its contents to a safe location. A MS Backup Repair Tool can be run with few simple steps without any aid or technical skills.

No comments:

Post a Comment