Program Recovery

[Kodiak]

Hypothetical situation but has happened: Customer calls up and says there pc is crashed and can't even boot. Upon arriving on the scene you discover there is no way to bust into the system and recover the system. They have only the windows disk and no software but they have several programs they just have to have like office 2003, etc, etc. Question is there any software available in this situation that could recover there software so it can be reinstalled on the newly formatted drive or any possible way to recover the programs? This would more then likely be on WinXp and more then likely caused by viruses and spyware.

[Stalemate]

Given the nature of how software is installed in Windows, especially Office, I would say no. There would need to be some fancy Registry hacking to be done to get this working again, which may not be 100% stable afterwards anyhow.

Alone, the fact that the client doesn't seem to have the proper licensing would tend to make me shy away from this type of work anyhow.
But the data might be salvageable by slaving the drive into another WinXP PC, taking ownership of the data folders in question (after deep scanning it with an antivirus) and then transferring to other drive/burning to CD.

[Kodiak]

This is just a hypothetical situation. It's just been a question on my mind for a long time but have been somewhat afraid to ask and maybe sound stupid. I have seen many pc's sold with no cd's to there software such as Dell, HP, Toshiba amoung others. Software to the OS yes but not to office which came preinstalled. Actually I was refering to just any program. I wasn't sure with all the advancement's in software that there may not just be something out there that could do just that. I normally do just as you indicated, if I can't use my ERD disk to copy there data I put it in an external enclosure and go after it. Winternals is an awesome program. I suppose you could also use bartsPe.

[Stalemate]

This is just a hypothetical situation. It's just been a question on my mind for a long time but have been somewhat afraid to ask and maybe sound stupid. I have seen many pc's sold with no cd's to there software such as Dell, HP, Toshiba amoung others. Software to the OS yes but not to office which came preinstalled. ...

Could those apps have been installed with the restore CD(s) that came with the PC?

I'm not familiar enough with those companies to know for sure, but strongly doubt they would package software without licences.

If so, then you're golden, having only to slap that in the drive, reboot, complete the process and then go on with data restoration.