"Hidden" attribute

I do hope someone can help me please. I am entirely new to Vista.

While mucking around trying to figure out why a legacy program would not
run, I decided to "unhide" the gateway recovery partition and somehow copy
the files to a disk.

Anyway, so that I would not injure the protected files I first copied the
files to a D drive partition created with Partition Magic V8.

I then used the Vista burner interface to prepare the files (on D) to burn a
dvd.

The size was over 5Gb, so it was not going to work.

I baled out, but kept getting a popup that said I had files prepared for
burning. So I went back into the burner window and deleted the files from
the list.

All the files and directories then became hidden. In the hidden partition,
and on D drive. I presume that Vista had locked the list of files to be
burned, and they are still locked even now.

When I view the directories for D I can see the folder names but no
contents. All the attributes are hsd for example.

I am obviously missing something. I would be most grateful for help. I
really need to create a system backup or ideally a restore set for the
Gateway recovery files.

I am a long way away from making my legacy software work on Vista.

Thanks


Ian