So do ensure you back up the data *before* touching it. You can use
ntfs-3g from a live cd environment (ubuntu etc.) to recover the data.
Side note: you may may not want to use the recovery partition, as it
might include extra software from the vendor.

2009/10/31 Ben Donohue <[email protected]>:
> 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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