I work for a rather large Automotive Supplier, and a guy in our racing division got this thing last week. I ended up pulling his hard drive and connecting it as a secondary on my laptop... I found that I had to change folder options to show hidden files, from there I was able to copy all of his files. Once copied to my hard drive, I had to 'un-hide' everything. I formatted his old drive, reimaged, copied everything back over and was good to.
Problem here, its almost impossible to fix this remotely, so I had to have the end user over night his laptop from NC to MI, and then vice versa. 4 day process. Fun time. F*** YOU to whoever wrote this thing.