Restoring SQL 8 .bak file to SQL 9 won't work

[computerchick]

I am trying to restore an SQL .bak file to an SQL 2005 (9) database. I know to change the paths and overwrite the db I am restoring too, however it does not appear to have backwards compatibility to restore the files. Also the files in the bak have extensions .dat and .log - no mdf or ldf files.

This is a time sensitive project for a charity organization that I do volunteer work for so if anybody might know of a tool that can convert the SQL bak file into a usable restore file for SQL 2005 or even a different, more common file format ~ txt, csv ~ since I do not have the older SQL server.

Hope there is a guru out there with a fairly quick process that will do the trick!

[Purple]

Hi computerchick and welcome to TSDN

Are you trying to get a copy of the sql 2000 database available to sql2005 ?

if yes take a look at this post

if you can't get the database offline you could restore the sql2000 database in sql2000 with a new name and then move this into sql2005

Regards Purple

[computerchick]

Hey there purple. Thank you for the response. I was soo tired while I was working on it I never double checked the quality of my file - it was corrupted! After beating my head for about 6 hours I finally decided to create and restore a sample bak and it worked. I re-downloaded my big ugly file and that time it worked too. (Whew) Now I have the new problem of converting the data... a never ending battle! Thanks again for taking the time out to respond.