Extract recovery disk contents?

I was wondering if I could get the contents of the recovery disks without restoring the hard disk. Making a backup of the current systen, restoring using the DVDs and later restoring using the backup takes literally hours. Isn't there a way to access the contents of the recovery DVDs without restoring them?
I'm looking for the swsetup folder in there.

 

Errrm, what exactly are you trying to do?

SWsetup should be on the HD already - Unless you wiped the HD and reformatted.

You could just burn that to CD or DVD yourself.

Or if you did wipe it, using the recovery CD's should put it back.

I'm not sure if you can read the directory contents of the recovery CD's directly.

Please be more specific.

 

I did wipe out everything because I wanted XP Professional and upgrade failed. And as I mentioned, recovering takes hours.
And the actual contents that is put on the HD is not accessibly directly from the DVDs. The "preload" folder is full of *.inp files.

 

I guess what I am not following is that you are saying recovering takes hours, so you have done the recovery, so you should have the folder . . . Unless you recovered and then re-wiped the disk . . .

Ultimately, the best advice I can give is either to recover again, and then either ghost the entire disk, or manually burn the swsetup folder to a CD/DVD.

 

I have new installation now. Before, I did a backup of the current hard disk config, ran recovery, copied some, then restored everything. Took hours. The folder I have seems to be... incomplete. I'm sure there was a all-in-one setup somewhere that could basically install all drivers and software, but I don't seem to know where it is.
I just wanted to know if I could somehow access these files without recovering. By doing that, I could use the desktop computer to recover the files I wanted which has a lot fast HD, which in turn, means that it wouldn't take long to get the files I wanted.

It's just that the original installation (from the recovery DVDs) has XP Home and a lot of bloatware installed, you might say. I want professional. And what better way to remove all that installed than wiping the HD clean? Well, I did and I didn't think of saving the swsetup folder.

 

i did the same thing when i got mine.
i reformatted without burning the recovery drive (~15 cds, screw that) but i kept the recovery partition figuring i could access it somehow later if i needed to, but i never figured out how. so i copied the entire partition and have it saved on an old desktop, then deleted it. all i want from that partition is the swsetup folder which has all the drivers and stuff, since i didnt have access to it i searched and found all the drivers i needed online. still cant access the recovery partition, which is now on a diff desktop.

granted, i havent really tried to hard since i found everything online.

id be very interested in accessing it