Help with possible recovery(do not know the actual problem)
 

Hello,
First thanks in advance for any help especially if
I learn something along the way.

A friend of mine and I have an EeePc it was running windows xp and we decided to put (or try to put) some form of Linux on it, eventually we went with something called crash bang Linux it installed well and I think(hope) that we did not remove the windows xp from it. We can boot into, via grub, crash bang 10, crash bang 10 recovery mode and: windows NT/2000/XP (on /dev/sda3).
When we try to boot windows it says 'starting windows preinstallation environment' it then goes to the windows loading screen (logo, blue loading thing) and then finally comes up with a window saying "You will lose all your data during system recovery. Ensure to back up your important data before recovery your system(not a misprint, bad Microsoft grammar).
it has a tick and an exit button, if we click the exit button it reboots, if we click the tick it goes into symantec ghost 11.0, it has a progress indicator and takes around ten minutes to finish and then reboots.
If we then try to boot into windows again it does exactly the same thing.
If we boot into crunch bang and go into Gparted it tells us the following:
In a popup window:
Failed to mount "77G Volume" the enclosing volume is locked.
and Failed to mount "5G volume" the enclosing folder is locked.

and then it goes to the main screen: we have four partitions:
Partition file system mount point label size used unused flags
/dev/sda1 - ntfs - 72.06G 7.65GiB 64.42GiB boot
/dev/sda2 (keys) ext3 / 72.05G 2.92Gib 69.13GiB
/dev/sda3 fat32 PE 4.89G 4.2GiB 689.99MiB hidden, Iba (don't know if it is l or i)
/dev/sda4 (!)unknown 47.07MiB
unallocated 2.49MiB

Basically I want to know whether or not we have lost windows or more importantly data and files from windows and whether or not
we can get it back and running with at least the files intact(programs are of secondary concern).
Again thanks in advance and sorry about the length but I have no idea what i am doing.

I would hope the locked status saved you. Last I looked at crunchbang (a while back admittedly) it used classsic grub. If that is still the case, highlight the Windows entry on the boot menu, and hit "e" (no quotes) then edit the "root" line to be "root (hd0,0)".
Hit enter, then "b" to boot. See if Windoze boots (this is a one-time change).

sda3 is hidden recovery partition. It should have acopy of wins installation in it. If you check in your bios you should see that there's a D2D transfer option enabled.

before edit:
insmod part_mdos
insmod fat
set root='(hd0,msdos3)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set cced-990e
drivemap -s (hd0) ${root}
chainloader +1

after boot:
insmod part_mdos
insmod fat
set root='(hd0,0)'
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set cced-990e
drivemap -s (hd0,0) ${root}
chainloader +1

pressing enter just makes a new line,
crtl-x boots


It still just boots into preinstallation environment.
and when I go into the editing place again after reboot it is set back to the "before edit"
stage.
Is there anything else I could try?

In which part of the BIOS should I find this(I can't)?

That's grub2 - like I said, it was a while ago I looked at it.
I'm off to bed - I'll post later.

I'm going to checkout my laptop and post back.
Are you running a live-cd right now?

Mine is an acer aspire but D2D is under Maintab in bios.
The tab is labeled Main

If you're using live-cd you can view the files in hidden partition.

It's trying factory restore.

Thanks but I only want to restore to factory as a last resort, I have a lot of work on there.

If your crunch bang is working you can access all pf your partitions through file manager, just click on Computer and you should see all 4 partitions along with cd and usb drives.

From your first post:It actually warns you that you will loose all your data, you do it nonetheless, and now you want your data back?
You may be out of luck. Boot with your Crunchbang install-medium and have a look at your partitions with the file-manager. You may have luck and find your data, but I doubt so.
Lesson learned (hopefully) for the future: You should always have a backup, especially before major changes, like repartition your drive to install another OS.

@TobiSGD i Have beenlooking for a while now but where do you find the files(if they are there)?