factory restore without recovery disk??

[Cosmo2003]

hi all,
i've been given a HP pavillion ze4200 with XP Pro which is riddled with viruses, spyware etc...

i figure the quickest thing to do would be to do a factory restore on it and start from scratch, but the problem is that I don't have the recovery disks, just the XP Pro disk.

my question is how can i initiate the factory restore procedure?

is there a file in the c:\i386 folder that will do it??

thanks in advance!!

 

[snypercore]

i think you can call HP they will send then to you no probs, my mother STIPIDLY payed for a prebuilt PC from a bunch of day light robbers *also known as PC World salesmen* and she never created the restore disks somethign went wrogn and she called phillips and they sent the disks fine. that or you cna just install XP from scratch which is what id do anyways. you also wouldnt get all the bundled shite and adware like "ZOMG FREE AOL TRIAL" n all that


OR you could follow "waresmonster's" guide to removing spy/adware and other crap its a great guide with great free software. then there may not be a need to "recover"

P.s the guide is in his sig

 

[EricB]

hit f10 when you turn on the computer

 

[Cosmo2003]

nothing happens when i press F10 at startup??

 

[EricB]

nothing happens when i press F10 at startup??

then your should be in control. panel.

they (hp, compaq) will do it 1 of 3 ways.

1.they will give you the disc
2.it's in control panel or start menu
3. hit f10

2 and 3 will usually will give you the option of burning it to cd and dvd too

 

[Cosmo2003]

nothing in the control panel or the start menu??

any other ideas please as I'm stumped??!!

 

[yosa]

No clue what factory restore means(reinstall everything?), download a few free apps(ad aware, avg 7 for egsample) run them in safe mode, turn off system restore, run them again, there are a number of programs that can detect mallware without the need to wipe the drive.

 

[EricB]

I just had an hp media center pc that I was fixing yesterday. I could not find it at first. it was under pc tools (or something like that) in the start menu

 

[Cosmo2003]

still couldn't find, either in the start menu or control panel

think i've managed to get rid of virus' and other bad stuff, then ran the XP Repair off the CD, just finished all the updates and everything seems back to normal!

thanks for ya help