I assume that by .BAK you mean a database dump, right?

I've not worked with MSSQL, but Sybase database dumps are binary dumps, using direct page copies from the original database device (and MSSQL is a direct descendant of the Sybase code line, in case you're wondering why this is relevant :-). Parsing such files is seriously non-trivial, unfortunately. Lots of people would love to have such a utility, though, because binary database dumps aren't portable between hardware platforms (or sometimes even between OS versions).

Personally I'd check to see if MS offers an eval version of MSSQL, and then load the dump into a running server. This will almost certainly be the fastest way of getting at the data...

This being said, I don't want to be excessively pessimistic. Have you looked at the file with a hex editor to see if there is any structure that you can distinguish?

Michael