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. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
