Restoring files on a hidden partition

[Admiral208]

My friend has asked me to take a look at his laptop which wont boot correctly, it will get to the Windows screen and then a BSOD will appear and the process will start again, looping the startup process.

 

I have told him that the best way to resolve the issue is to format the computer and reinstall windows and start again from scratch. Here's where the problem lies because he has no recovery discs or anything.

 

There is a hidden partition which contains what looks like an image of the original folders that would have been installed, i.e. Documents and Settings, Program Files, Windows and a few others.

 

Here is my question. How can i get the files off of the hidden partition and onto the Primary Partition? The hidden partition doesnt seem to be formatted.

 

Any software that i can use to clone the hidden partition onto the other.

 

Thanks

 

James

[OutToLunch]

Odd way to resolve the issue... Hold F8 during startup, disable automatic restart on crash. Read BSOD. Diagnose, fix

[Admiral208]

not an odd way to resolve the problem, the easiest for me.

 

Anyway...

 

I found out the error message and it doesn't help at all.

 

it says to check for viruses, remove any newly installed hardware, run chkdsk then restart.

 

For those of you that might understand this the technical information is

 

*** STOP: 0x0000007b (0x80399BB0, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

[ICTNUT]

Looks like an IBM/Lenovo laptop, they use F10 or F11 at start to access the revovery manager which will restore it back to factory default image for you.

 

The error is an iaccessable boot device and from the google search results seems to be driver issues.

[srochford]

Could they have fiddled in the BIOS settings? If so, check to see if they've turned on (or off!) SATA AHCI; changing this will break XP and you will get a 7B error.

 

if you do need to restore and none of the F keys give you access to the recovery you could boot from a Linux CD or Ultimate Boot CD and change the partitions so that the "other" one is set active. Restart the machine and it should boot from it and run the recovery process but be careful because this normally just wipes and reinstalls everything.