rebooting or system recovery?

Question

I'm trying to restore my computer, but I don't have any recovery disc. I want everything erased, except the programs that came with it when I first bought it. Does anyone know how this can be done?
Any help is greatly appreciated in advance.

Answer 1

Depending on the age of the unit, and the current condition really would assist in the answering of this question however I'll give you a general well-rounded response to this subject matter.

First thing is, if the unit is a major manufacturer brand (not custom built) and 3 years or less old (some of which can be 4 years old) there is a recovery partition built onto the unit itself. Simply you can perform the recovery by the following methods:

A) Upon boot during the initial BIOS Prompt (i.e. "HP" prompt prior to the "Windows" splash screen) you will notice a collection of keys and values on the bottom (HP = F10 to restore; Gateway = F11 to Restore).

B) If you can get into the operating system, go into the all-programs list and select the recovery media program installed on the unit (Titled "System Management" or "Recovery" or "Tech Box" -- it depends on the model/manufacturer) and simply run the recovery from there.

If you do not have recovery media and you do not have a recovery partition, then you're out of luck. You need to contact the manufacturer if you want it to return back to the original state it was in upon purchase (OEM Software/Proprietary installs).

Then of course there's always the bare-bones approach, simply restore utilizing the actual operating system disc.

If you replaced the units hard-drive and it did have a recovery partition, most hard-drives from major retails (Western Digital, Seagate) come with data transfer utilities, when done right you can actually transfer the recovery partition and allow it to restore in that method however it can be a little tricky at times.

Last but not least if you're at the very worst scenario, you replaced the units hard-drive and it did have a recovery partition and you can not get it to transfer, you can order partition creation discs for major manufacturers from them directly, however this is a very long process (HP aXXXXn series can take up to 6 hours).

Hopefully that answers the question for you, or anyone else browsing this!

Answer 2

You need a reformat disc to format your laptop. If you don't have the bootable OS disc, what you could do is to go to your computer service centre, they could reformat for you or sell you the reformat cd-rom.

Answer 3

I am not 100 percent sure but you may be able to use SYSTEM RESTORE and go back to the date your computer was first used at your location...
START, ALL PROGRAMS, ACCESSORIES, SYSTEM
TOOLS, SYSTEM RESTORE