My wife's Emachine PC (produced just prior to Gateway's takeover of Emachines) originally came with Vista Home Premium on it.

Because of some classes that she was taking, it was an absolute MUST that she had XP on it (she wouldn't even consider a virtual machine - go figure?).

So, we removed Vista and installed XP.

Now that the class is done, her XP load is going screwy because of all kinds of garbage that my step-son did on it via various less-than-savory websites, and she wants Vista back.

Between then and now we moved and we haven't the first clue where any of the restore CDs or DVDs are - BUT - there is a partition on the hard drive that was created by PC Angel.

Is there any way that we can get the data from that partition back into place on the C drive and have a usable, bootable OS without having to jump through hoops or shelling out money for a new restore CD/DVD ?

It would appear by the folder structures there and everything that I've seen in them that it's a full blown setup of Vista Home Premium.

Any help is appreciated!

Yes, and unfortunately all they mention is using the restore CD...

There's got to be another way! (fingers crossed!)

I'll check that first thing when I get home. I just RDPed into my machine at home but because of the issues we're having with her box, I am able to ping it but not connect via daisy-chained RDP...

Can't map a drive either - says there aren't enough resources :-(

Partition is labeled as "Recovery" and is a 9.64GB partition.

It's a T5086 ... I'll check the F11 options when it gets done doing a hard drive error scan.

Well damn, why couldn't it be that easy on all machines? LOL

Thanks!