[plug] Recovering Windows setup partition

[Kevin Shackleton]

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 has been up for over an hour with Ubuntu live boot.

Of course these poor mortals didn't create a system setup 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' presently a live CD in the optical drive.

(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.