Link

I was greeted with this issue on Friday morning. It took the IT guy several hours (several computers, and several OSes) to fix it using the steps described at:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itproinstall/thread/1c9a7151-b48c-4a98-aae7-a4b82682ea8e#bcabda57-7338-499f-aee2-d708e76df315

Apparently, if you have the admin account turned on, you can get to the recovery console from the diagnostic GUI. I was not so lucky..!