[SLUG] Using a Linux live CD to recover a Windows installation DVD

[Kevin Shackleton <kevins@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.