Want to recover a machine which has a “PC Angel” recovery partition, but the MBR is hosed so you can’t recover with “F10″ like the manual states?
Boot the system with KNOPPIX (or any other recovery disk with a partition editor), then use fdisk to change the partition with ID 12 (“Compaq Diagnostics”) to ID 7 (“NTFS”) and mark it bootable. Then reboot and voila, recovery boots.
After recovering, you’ll have to change the partition table back to how it was before, because the recovery software will not fix this for you. However, it will fix the MBR so recovering with F10 will be functional again after this.
If you don’t change the ID or the partition table is hosed in an other way, you’ll get a blue screen of the recovery software with error 0xC000003A (STATUS_OBJECT_PATH_NOT_FOUND). This was the problem I had, so I put it in the blog post to aid people searching for this problem to find it. 
Another way to recover the recovery partition could be the software on http://www.headstartservice.nl/downloads_details.aspx?id=2225. I have not tried this myself.
Update (2008-05-10): The website above is no longer functional, so you’ll have to fix it through the procedure above.
Sweet Zombie Jesus, this saved me so much time working on someone else’s machine. I used GParted on Ubuntu Live, worked great. I love you.
Manual PC Angel System recovery blog was great, how did you manage to work that out, good job.
However, the website http://www.headstartservice.nl seems to have gone…
Regards
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Thank you for the information about changing the ID of the partition in the partition table.
Thank you very much for this information! Saved my day.
You r GOD !!! thank you thank you thank you thank you…..