Hi Kevin,
Usually the recovery partition is accessed by pressing F12, or F11 or
whatever.
This usually overwrites the system completely. You will lose forever the
data on the partition that it overwrites.
Better to pull the disk out and connect it as a slave to another PC.
Recover the data. Then access the recovery partition to overwrite the
disk back to the day it was purchased.
Ben
Kevin Shackleton wrote:
I have someone's PC with a fairly corrupt Windows setup - drops to BSOD
after just a few seconds. BSOD does not stay up long enough to read.
System runs fine with Ubuntu live boot (I initially suspected a hardware
problem like the power supply or CPU cooling).
Of course these poor mortals didn't create a system setup / recovery DVD
with their new machine. And I don't see them as handling anything but
XP. The good news though is that using the live CD I see it there's a 6
GB sda1 FAT32 partition with the 'hidden' flag set. The contents of
this partition seem to be exactly a Windows setup DVD of 3.70 GB.
Question is - what do I do to recover the setup partition? A couple of
options are to either set up the partition as not-hidden and bootable,
and set up a boot loader so I can pick this partition to boot from, or
else to write the contents of this partition to a bootable DVD, even
though there's presently a live CD in the optical drive. (I could make a
USB 'live CD').
I looked in the sda2 ntfs volume and could not see a Windows utility to
do this job. It's a NEC Powermate. Thre is a NEC Utilities folder but
it's empty.
(of course having access to the recovery option in Windows is no
assurance of achieving a stable system some time in the future!)
I've done a bit of googling for some hints without success. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Kevin.
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