Reboot HP Pavillion to Factory Condition

[killawatts13]

Hey I bought a HP Pavillion a6123w a couple years back and I have accumulated to much junk on it that I want to erase it all. I have no CD's from when I bought the computer, but I did burn a disk of the neosmart vista 32-bit recovery disk. I want to erase everything on this computer but am not sure how to. I tried finding the system partition and it said there was not any.??? what to do?!

 

[Terry60]

The HP instructions used to be public, but now they make you jump through hoops for it.
From memory, F11 (possibly F10) as you power up should go to the factory reset option if you haven't removed the recovery partition.
If you have removed it, no amount of tinkering with our recovery disc will help you. It contains no installation files. It cannot be used to (re)install Vista. It's just for repairing a broken boot process.

 

[PhilT]

I'm wrestling with two HPs where restoring to factory condition is starting to look inevitable. In one case F11 doesn't work nor does making the HP_RECOVERY partition bootable, but I suspect some BCD magic could fix the latter. Anyone up for helping ?

My other angle of attack is to use ImageX from a bootable WinPE disk to utilise the WIM image files on the recovery partition, watch this space...

 

[mqudsi]

You just need to add a WinPE entry pointing to the WIM file in EasyBCD.

 

[PhilT]

You just need to add a WinPE entry pointing to the WIM file in EasyBCD.

How do I do that please - from the command line when EasyBCD can't be installed on a non-booting system.

Or can I put EasyBCD on a WinPE boot CD somehow ?